


Cupid Carries a Gun

by Sarasvati_Fautheree



Category: Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Blood Play, Explicit Sexual References, Fallout New Orleans, Multi, New Orleans, Polyamory, Slow Burn Romance, Westek Experiment, Witchcraft, frequent curse words, non-cannon John Hancock backstory, some nonconsent references/dubious consent, some violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-08 21:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 35
Words: 87,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7774987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarasvati_Fautheree/pseuds/Sarasvati_Fautheree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years after the Sole Survivor has brought down the Institute, John Hancock and Nick Valentine have a problem they never thought they'd face: boredom.  Fortunately, Mama Murphy has a vision that sends them on a quest for the "Answer" to their boredom.  Only problem?  That answer is in the remnants of New Orleans, Louisiana.  And it's liable to really infringe on the pair's comfort zones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Easy Living

**Author's Note:**

> Will attempt to keep this mostly spoiler free. For the purposes of this story, the call that takes Nick to Far Harbor doesn't come and there are some minor differences in his origin story.

Prologue: Easy Living

 

John Hancock couldn’t believe this shit.

 

He was bored. It had been five years since the General of the Minutemen/Agent Bullseye/Nate had defeated the Commonwealth’s favorite bogeyman. Settlements had been built, the Railroad and the Minutemen had checkpoints along every road to make travel safer, and agriculture had made hunger a thing of the past for a lot of settlements. They had even managed to clear out most of the yao guai and giant insects near the settlements.

 

Even Goodneighbor was quiet. Between Hancock and the General and his Minutemen, all the drifters now had homes and jobs and mostly steady income. Fahrenheit was more than capable of taking care of the day-to-day mayoral responsibilities. Now Hancock wandered the Commonwealth from settlement to settlement, looking for a little hell to raise and finding absolutely none. The only thing he had to really do anymore was read, get high, and have random back-alley fucks. A ghoul could only do so much of that before it lost its appeal. And fucking up mirelurks and yao guai and blood bugs was not as much fun as it once had been. They weren’t purposefully evil, they were just following instinct like everyone else. It was all just too...easy. Or maybe meaningless was the word he was looking for.

 

He knew Valentine was in much the same boat. For a while there it had gotten really exciting, with Valentine and Hancock and the General frying some pretty big Institute fish, but since things had calmed and stabilized Valentine's biggest cases tended to be cheating husbands and lost dogs. They both knew Valentine was made for more than this, too. He spent a lot of his time going back to what he had done before the detective business, repairing and building things just to keep himself busy. Hancock had no idea how the synth stayed sane. At least Hancock had to sleep. Valentine didn't even have that biological necessity to keep him distracted. Chems did nothing for him and if he had a sex drive, Hancock had never been able to see so much as an inkling of it. Hancock would have been practically suicidal by now.

 

Thus it was that he found himself sitting in the shade of a ruined tree in Sanctuary Hills, watching the settlers going about their peaceful business and wishing for just one raider to fuck up.

 

Not that there wasn't some guilt attached to that wish. He knew he should be happy that what they had always worked for had finally come to pass. It was surely psychotic to actively wish for a little violence and threatened death.

 

He smelled the synth before he heard that familiar deep voice. He was a comforting mix of coolant, smoke and bourbon. "Mama Murphy's looking for us."

 

Hancock raised one eyebrow. "She's not begging me to make her some jet again, I hope. The General almost kicked my ass into my shoulderblades last time I supplied her." He paused, then grinned. "Actually, I could use a little excitement. Let me fire up the chemistry station."

 

Nick chuckled. "Still bored I see."

 

"Aren’t you? Let's go see what she wants."

 

They found her in her accustomed spot, sitting beside a scavenging station taking apart old fans and toasters for parts. Her age made her unable to stand all the bending and kneeling of farming, but she was still good with her hands and the steady work almost kept her from missing the chems. Some days, like today, the meditative rhythm even induced a vision.

 

"There you are. Got a trip for you two to go on."

 

Hancock sighed. "Let me guess. Another exciting scavving run for some broken down machinery and a little spare ammo?"

 

"Always the smartass. You can bring that stuff back with you if you want, but you might better wait until after you get there to go rummaging. You're not after scrap. You're after the answer."

 

Nick lit a cigarette, passed it to Hancock, and lit another for himself. "Answer to what exactly, Mama Murphy?"

 

"Your mutual problem. The sight told me you're stagnating. Growing dim. All this easy living has you about ready to dig your own graves and jump in. Tell me I'm wrong."

 

Nick shook his head, but Hancock murmured "No, you're right on the caps." He felt the synth's eyes on him, but refused to look. Let Nick continue the "always grateful just to be alive" kick he was on if he wanted. Hancock had always been the restless sort, from childhood onward, and he saw no need to hide it now. Hell, the need for excitement was what had started him on the chems, all those years ago.

 

"You've got a long ways to go. You should probably leave today. I didn't see when the storm will hit exactly, but you'll be cutting it close as it is."

 

"Mama Murphy, it might help if you could be just a little less mysterious," Nick said.

 

"Sorry Detective. The sight ain't exactly a precision tool. I just know what I saw. I saw a great big ship. Mostly rusted through now, but when it was young, boy it must have been impressive. The whole top deck is glass. Your answer is on that ship. There's a doorway with a code name on it: PW 12."

 

"What answer will we find there, Mama Murphy," Hancock asked, his voice low as he unconsciously leaned in close to her. He had always been fascinated by the unusual and extraordinary, and Mama Murphy’s visions certainly fit.

 

"I don't know boys. But whatever it is, I know it'll change everything for you two. And I know if you don't get there soon, the storm will drown it."

 

"Do you, uh, have a city," Nick asked.

 

"It was called the Crescent City before the war. Iron balconies everywhere. Still have a few strands of beads hanging on 'em."

 

Nick chuckled. "Been ages since I had a proper vacation."

 

"What,” Hancock asked. “What are we looking for?”

"Looks like we're going all the way to the southern edge of the country, John. I think she's talking about New Orleans."


	2. Chapter 2

Two Months Later

It was a good thing Nick didn't technically have to sleep. Hancock was stubborn as hell--probably had been since the day he was born, Nick mused--and insisted that with his various chems he could keep going until his body was shaking and spent. The already thin ghoul was almost skeletal now, but he frequently refused to stop for food, for rest, for much of anything. He was so excited to be back out on the road, to just have something to do, that he seemed to want to do nothing but travel, get high, and kill. He had apparently gotten addicted to travel during their days with the General, and until Mama Murphy's "vision" he hadn't had a real fix in months.

Now he was practically unstoppable. He had "borrowed" a camera with the kind of film you shook to develop it from the General, and was taking pictures of damn near everything new they came across. First they had crossed the glowing sea, and boy had the ghoul been in fine spirits those days. It was like the radiation fueled him--which, Nick supposed, it did--and he had found something to exclaim over every few feet. And this time, he had said, he was going to take photos to prove his exploits. Albino rad scorpions the size of cars--snap. Black blossoms floating on shallow puddles of glowing, irradiated water--snap. A random concrete pyramid--snap.

Then they had crossed the Capital Wasteland, and Hancock had of course found more things to take pictures of. A giant water purification project, old buildings that had once housed the nation's leaders--he had even insisted that Nick take a picture of him standing on top of the cockpit of a downed vertibird, middle finger in the air and the other hand holding up a machete, posing with one knee up like the pirate on the old bottles of the rum Nick had favored before the war. Nick simply shook his head and did as Hancock wanted.

And the whole time, questions, questions, questions. If Nick never heard another question from the ghoul, it would be too soon. "What was this used for?" "What kind of place was this?" "Did you ever come here before the war?" "How come this is here?"...Endless streams of questions about every new thing he came across. Nick was almost flattered that Hancock seemed to see him as a guide to everything he didn't know about pre-war. But he was also frustrated by how often Hancock seemed to assume that, just because his consciousness had been around before the apocalypse, he knew everything there was to know. And "I don't know" or “I don’t remember” was never the end of Hancock's questions, oh no. Then it was "well why don't you know," and "but how can we find out" and "c'mon man, I know you know more than you're telling me."

It was enough to make Nick infinitely grateful for the few hours of quiet he did manage to get when Hancock made his rare foray into sleep or asked for some "alone time" that invariably had him coming back more relaxed. Nick had his suspicions what Hancock's alone time consisted of--appropriately enough for his name, it involved both his hand and his cock--but he kept quiet. Hancock was a man of voracious appetites for everything from chems to sex to experiences, and Nick was frankly stunned that he hadn't managed to plow everything with a pulse from Sanctuary Hills to their current location. It was almost amusing, in its way, how damn hungry Hancock was for sensation and life.

It was this never-ending appetite that made Nick ignore the looks Hancock sometimes gave him. The sly flirtations, the comments, the moments he stood too close. Hancock couldn't possibly mean anything by them; he was just wanting another experience. Probably wanted to see if screwing a prototype synth was any different from any of the humans, ghouls, or gen 3 synths he'd had. No way Nick was going to throw away a perfectly good friendship just so John could sate a passing curiousity. Nick had seen what happened when Hancock got extra "friendly" with someone. It invariably wouldn't be long until he was taking off, unable or unwilling to stand the questions about where the relationship was going or if he felt anything for them above the waist. It was just who he was. Just like those he had been with generally couldn’t help wanting more. That, too, was just who he was.

Besides, ever since Dr Amari had hacked into some of his previously blocked memories of his time in the Institute, any urges he might have had to touch anyone were...stunted. It was part of the reason his synthetic skin was so damned grimy. He couldn't stand to be without his clothes, even long enough to wash himself. He couldn't stand to look in the mirror long enough to scrub away the dirt or try to repair the open areas.

Too bad the dirt and the missing skin did nothing to dissuade a certain ghoul from his flirting.

*********

His hands tremored, imperceptibly to anyone but a synth with a synth’s heightened senses, as he lit a cigarette and waited for Hancock to get finished mixing chems. He had gotten good enough at it that he didn't even need a station anymore. He would make do with a small camp fire, a couple of glass vials and some bottled water. He ground plants and seeds with the butt of his knife on any old chunk of concrete, used water from puddles when he had nothing else, and in general showed enough ingenuity that Nick thought he might have made a great scientist for the Institute, if they had been a little less evil and Hancock had been a little less anarchist. He watched the ghoul’s hands work and felt himself still. Hancock was graceful and precise at his tasks. It always amazed Nick that for someone so energetic and playful, he could become as still and focused as any monk. The ghoul was a study in contradictions.

By the time Hancock was through and had another hit of jet, Nick was able to focus on the road again, while his companion focused on the way his high made every color brighter.

After they had left the Capital Wasteland, they had traveled in a diagonal line towards what had once been Louisiana, and according to Nick's internal maps and sensors they were making excellent time. He expected it to get hot the further south they went, relying he supposed on memories the old Nick had had about the one time his family had gone to visit his grandparents in Georgia, but it seemed that full scale nuclear war had done something to the climate to standardize it across much of the area they traveled. He had memories of snow in Boston, after all, but had yet to see more than a few flakes since the day he had woken in the Institute's garbage heap. He supposed it wasn't out of the question that the same changes that had made Boston more temperate and warm, had made the southern states more temperate and cool. They passed through multiple small settlements on their way, most of them what would have been considered "country" before the war. Farmers with small lines of supply stretched between them, a few tinkerers and hired mercenaries; it seemed that the survivors of this brave new world were surprisingly similar over large areas of the country. Nick supposed it had to do with their lifestyles. Not exactly a lot of time in any of the wastelands to do much more than farm, kill, and trade.

But the wildlife....ohhhhh the wildlife. Hancock was absolutely fascinated with the new animals and plants they came across. In the ruins of Tennessee they finally started to see trees with actual foliage, and if Nick didn't know any better he'd say Hancock was almost in tears. He had taken to collecting the leaves between pages of that damn book he brought everywhere with him, the one he must have read a thousand times by now. Most of them were yellow and orange, and Nick's chronometer informed him that it was at that time mid-September. They passed large bushes of roses the size of their heads, blood red petals that were spotted and streaked with a pale pink that literally glowed in the dark. Squirrels the size of Dogmeat scampered through the trees and a few threw things at them as if to chase them away. Nick hadn't been able to help but to laugh, and had spent thirty minutes trying to explain to a doubtful Hancock that squirrels had once been tiny and cute and fairly harmless. In Alabama they had run across a settlement that had trained yao guai that they could ride and use to pull a plow, and for 25 caps Nick had the pleasure of watching Hancock try not to shit himself as he rode one around the fences. The animal may have been "tamed" by the settler's terms, but Nick had not been able to help laughing at John's expression as it had run and dodged, apparently a little wilder with someone it didn't know.

They had almost been killed several times over as well, of course. Raiders were raiders, and they were in every state the pair had come across. They may have dressed a little differently or had different accents, but they still were at heart thugs and pirates. One settlement's preacher, a self-proclaimed second coming of Jesus, had denounced Nick as an antichrist because of his mechanical nature, and they had barely escaped that one, mowing down townsfolk with assault rifles stolen from the church as they ran out the gates and never looked back. There had been an incident in a bar in Mississippi involving a man taking offense to Hancock's shameless flirting with the bar keep, who happened to be the man's mother--but a very well preserved woman who looked no older than thirty and was in any case the only unattached woman in the area who looked like she might be game for a roll in the hay. Literal hay, as it turned out; Nick had found the two in the hayloft behind the bar, naked as the day they were born with the woman's son aiming his pistol straight at Hancock's favorite body parts. Life wasn't always comfortable with Hancock around, but it was always an adventure. It had taken him at least half an hour to talk their way out of that one.

What was unusual was that, the closer they got to their destination, the quieter Hancock got. By the time they reached the Louisiana state line (according to Nick's internal map), Hancock had actually stopped asking his endless questions. By the time they reached a bridge that was so long he couldn't see the end of it over a huge lake, Hancock was positively silent.

Maybe it was something to do with the weather. Nick had noted that the clouds had begun moving faster overhead and the wind had become a steady companion. As they reached the lake’s shore, the sky had taken on an unusual orange tinge that he had never seen before. Not green like the rad storms, and not the dark heavy purplish of a normal storm--but flickering orange, as if the world was on fire just out of his line of sight. It had been barely visible in the bright daylight, but now that the sun was halfway behind the horizon it was bright enough to light their way.

They couldn't use the bridge itself to cross the water, of course. Huge chunks of it had fallen through long ago. It had taken them a couple of hours of scavving and repairing to get a small boat they could use. Hancock had muttered something about Nick leading him to his death, but it actually hadn't taken that much reassuring to get the ghoul into the boat--though he had continued to mutter periodically through their trip that he had a bad feeling about this. The small motor at the end of the boat had enough power to run like new once they replaced the on switch that had rusted out. Nuclear powered, no doubt. Nick sometimes wondered, with their dependence on nuclear powered everything, that they hadn't all blown themselves to hell much earlier, and by accident.

The boat ride was so quiet and uneventful that it ought to have made for a good nap for Hancock--but between that growing, flickering orange glow to the south and their own theories about what this "answer" Mama Murphy had mentioned might be, neither of them could relax. Hancock reasoned that maybe the answer was some experimental chem, which had caused Nick to scoff, "with you, everything is chems". Nick's idea was that maybe it was some kind of files that could help the General and his settlements--after all, a giant ship and a codeword did seem to imply some sort of military or government involvement, he reasoned aloud. Hancock's answer? "With you, everything is data." They would have laughed at each other had they not been so uptight by this point, but instead they lapsed into silence, watching the flickering light play on the water's choppy surface.

Even with the motor, it took them almost an hour to reach anything that might once have been land. The area was choked with weeds, curvy unkempt trees and roots that drove themselves up out of the water in sinuous humps. Fireflies zipped in front of them, driven into a frenzy by the ever-increasing wind. The air brought with it the smell of damp, of greenery left to rot in puddles and wood that had pulped in the humidity. They could only assume that the area had once been land, based on the mostly drowned warehouses and rusted shipping containers. They cut off the motor to keep it from getting busted on anything they might run across under the surface.

Back in the Capital Wasteland, they had found an old Enclave power armor suit that had almost entirely rusted through. Nick had pried the flashlight off of the helmet and rigged it up to work with a fusion cell strapped to it with a bit of copper wire. Now he held that light up, letting it play over decrepit buildings and skeletons. There were more of them here than he might have imagined--skeletons that was. He supposed that around the Commonwealth many of the people had simply been vaporized or burnt to ash in the blasts, and perhaps the skeletons he did find were from those who had survived the initial blast only to die by other means. But here, there were no scorchmarks on the buildings, no melted steel, no indications that a bomb had dropped. 

Then there was the loot. Many of the skeletons still wore glittering jewels and metals. Shelves filled with cans of goods behind the brittle, grimy shop windows. He almost felt the circuits in his head going into overdrive. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to leave all this wealth just laying in the streets. He knew that the Crescent City had been known as the most haunted city in America before the war, but legends didn’t keep people away from good scavving. Not these days. 

He caught Hancock staring at him. “You’re wondering too, aintcha?”

“Wondering what?”

“What killed all those people. Too bad you didn’t come with an internal geiger, too. But I can feel it. There are enough rads in this place to keep an army of ghouls happy for a decade. And this is two centuries later. Think what it must have been like before.”

“Where are the ghouls, then?”

Hancock shrugged. “Maybe it was too much at the time to ghoulify anybody. Maybe it just killed them first. I don’t understand it. More rads than the glowing sea, but it’s all in the water and I don’t see any craters or burn marks.” He ran his hands through the water and sighed. “I usually don’t go in for swimming--too nasty usually--but I may have to make an exception for this.”

“What’s that feel like,” Nick asked. He had always wondered. Back in the Glowing Sea he had seen the ghoul close his eyes and soak in the rads, looking for all the world like a cat sunning itself. 

“It’s...warm. Kinda tingly all over, like you can feel every cell in your body. Feels kinda like a psycho high.”

Nick raised one eyebrow. “That would explain a few things about the behavior of the ferals.”

“I guess so.” Hancock broke into a grin. “Don’t worry, Nicky. I can hold my chems and my rads just fine. And even if I did try to eat you, I’d just break my teeth.”

“Or I’d break them for you,” Nick said, deadpan. “You’re a good friend, John. I’d rather you didn’t make me ruin that lovely smile of yours. The women of Goodneighbor would never forgive me.”

“I got news for you, pal. The women of everywhere would never forgive you. Some of the men either.” 

Nick couldn’t help but chuckle at that, but as something in the not-so-distant gloom gave off a deep rumbling growl, the two sobered quickly and clutched at their guns. Directly in front of them on the water’s surface, three glowing red eyes the size of dinner plates glared. Slowly they blinked in tandem. The only sound was the cocking of Hancock’s shotgun. The eyes came closer and something nudged the front of the boat, almost gently, as though testing it. Nick trained the flashlight on it. It was long, longer than the boat, longer almost than one of the old city buses had been back in the Commonwealth. It was pale white, its flesh covered in mushrooms, moss, and vines, like a living island. Nick geared himself up for battle as he whispered, “alligator.”

“What,” Hancock asked, too loudly.

“Alligator. They eat meat. Or, they did, before the bombs.” 

The creature’s limbs were long and burly, and its tail was a thing of pure muscle. On the vegetation of its back, frogs and lizards scurried and went about their lives. Nick cocked his gun, ready to fight for his life, but the beast did not open its mouth.

Then Nick realized there was a reason for that. It couldn’t open its mouth. There was an in indentation where the lips would have been on its ancestors, but no actual opening. The creature had gills under its arms and its nostril slits had multiplied like its eyes, resulting in three large openings along the top of its snout. Nick put his gun down and stared. The roots of the plants were embedded in the thing’s skin.

“I think it’s living off of those plants. Maybe photosynthesizing somehow. Look, it doesn’t have a mouth. That has to be how it lives,” Nick muttered.

Hancock lowered his gun and stared. “What do you mean it doesn’t have a mouth?”

Nick pointed. “I know that for someone as talkative as you that would be a nightmare, but see for yourself. It has to get its energy somehow. That’s the only way I can figure.”

Hancock shook his head. “Not often you find something that becomes less deadly from radiation.” 

Nick shrugged. “Life always finds a way. Hadn’t you noticed that yet? No matter what we throw at her, nature just takes it all in stride and finds a way to make it work to her advantage.”

“I noticed. It’s just that usually, nature’s advantage is our danger.”

“Agreed.” 

 

Out came Hancock’s ever present camera and, predictably, he requested that Nick light the alligator from several different angles so he could take pictures. 

“Where do you keep finding film for that thing?!” Nick was exasperated with all the clicking and the waiting by this point.

Hancock shrugged. “Not like people who were starving and getting shot at had cameras on the forefront of their minds, I guess. You take a look around sometime and you’ll notice a lot of things you wouldn’t expect just laying around, waiting to be picked up.”

Nick stared at him. Was he getting so wrapped up in his thoughts and theories in his old age that he was missing things that were right in front of him? He realized he had spent a lot of time pondering things, putting things together in his head. He wondered just how much he might have not seen.

They and the creature watched each other as they floated by. The thing was almost cute, with the vestigial remnants of a smile on its face. Now that they knew to look for the eyes barely cresting above the water, they saw more of them, slinking between buildings and carports, all heading away from the city. Now they had passed the warehouse district and were part of the way through a residential neighborhood. Flitting shadows in the windows of ruined houses were revealed by the flashlight to be small cats running on two legs, all of them apparently running away from the city and the orange light on the horizon, all too busy to notice or care about the synth and the ghoul in the boat. Thin raccoons festooned in glowing moss swam away from the city as well, and something flew past Hancock’s face just fast enough for him to be unable to tell what it was. 

“We seem to be the only idiots going toward the coast,” Hancock groused. “When every other species heads away, maybe we should take the hint.” 

“Mama Murphy wouldn't send us out here to die. If she thought we have enough time, we do. Maybe just barely though.”

“Bet now you’re glad I insisted on us keeping on going so many nights.” 

“Might be.” Nick lit a cigarette, his body incapable of craving the nicotine but his mind more than capable of craving the familiar actions. He smoked like a man might twiddle his thumbs; mere habit, movements and sensations to take his mind off of his worry. Pretty words aside, he had the same worries as Hancock. But if whatever the answer was had been important enough for Mama Murphy to have a vision of it, it was important enough to chase. Until he saw evidence that they were truly in immediate danger, his damned detective’s curiosity wouldn’t let him rest. He had to know, just as he always had. If John was the restless one, Nick was the one whose processor was always grinding away, taking in everything and putting pieces together as fast as it could. Maybe that’s why it irritated him so much when he couldn’t answer Hancock’s questions. They reminded him of his own unanswered questions and gave him that much more to ponder while the ghoul lost himself in chems or sex or sleep. 

Sometimes, Nick really, really resented his mind’s inability to ever completely shut down. Even when he performed his own version of “sleep”, his mind was running diagnostics, memories, consolidating data. His sleep consisted of rows upon rows of data rushing by his consciousness, sometimes too fast to ponder. Or sometimes memories, in technicolor and surround sound.

If only he could manually eject some of the memories he didn’t want. He hadn’t quite figured that one out yet. He knew that if anyone might have known how, Dr Amari might--but after the last time she had found some unexpected information in his head, and the embarrassment they had both suffered, he tended to stay out of the memory pods. All he needed was for more of his past to come uncovered instead of sliding farther into darkness. 

As they passed into the French Quarter the wildlife all but disappeared. Rusted wrought iron balconies leaned precariously over the water as crumbling brick buildings stood watch. Scraggly strands of beads, mostly black and orange with a few glow-in-the-dark thrown in, dangled from the leftovers of power lines and railings. The remains of cars hulked at the sides of the streets and Hancock made a game of reading the mildew-spotted signs they passed, asking and guessing what kinds of businesses they may have once been. They passed so many tourist shops advertising Mardi Gras beads and liquor that Hancock had begun to wonder why he had never heard of the beads and whether the liquor had been any good. Finally, illuminated by a flash of orange lightning, they saw it: the outline of an enormous ship, its entire top deck a mess of crackled glass and metal frame. The rusted hull still held the peeling remains of black paint and near the unusually sharp bow Nick could still make out the vestiges of a name: the Westek Dalton. Neither of them noticed the hulking shape in the water a few hundred yards past the ship, a submarine’s periscope sticking up from it and following their every move. 

"Well, now I know there’s something interesting on that ship," Nick said. "Westek. Research contractor for the government."

As expected, Hancock started snapping pictures again. Nick wasn't sure how any of them would turn out; the ghoul kept putting them in the little plastic-lined bag he'd hung from his flag belt without even looking at them. Come to think of it, he'd never seen Hancock look at them afterwards, either. He supposed John might be saving them for a bored rainy day when he didn't have anywhere to go anymore.

They took longer than they might have expected to reach the ship, thanks to the multiple mounds of mud that stood between their boat the the ship; the water was just deep enough that walking through it would have been vastly uncomfortable, but just shallow enough in places that they had to really push the boat along with a rusted iron pole Nick had yanked from under one of the balconies. Times like this, he was actually almost glad he was a synth; the increased strength and the increased speed of his processor did come in handy. Every twenty feet or so along the ship's hull, the remains of ladders reached up the side into the darkness. Nick wasn't sure how strong those rungs still were, but he could see no other way of getting up there.

"I'll go first," he told Hancock. "I'm not as likely as you to break if I fall from up there. And even if I did, it's faster to fix me than you. If it's sturdy enough you climb up after me; if not I'll find a rope or something to throw down to you."

"I'm not made out of glass," Hancock groused.

"I know you aren’t. But bone takes longer to fix than steel. And you don't have enough meat on the bone to shield it lately, either."

"I never knew you liked to be the dominant type." Hancock gave Nick one of his patented flirtatious grins, his canines a little longer and sharper than the average person's, his ebony eyes luminous pits of tar that threatened to pull Nick in. Nick shrugged the comment off and started climbing, wordlessly. He tried not to imagine the younger man writhing beneath him in ecstasy, his hands tied together with that damn flag...if he kept this up, he’d have to run another diagnostic. 

The ladder held, by some miracle or grace, and the two made it to the top deck without incident. Laser turrets stood at the ship's railing every few feet, all unpowered now and pointed down toward the deck. A missing deck plate revealed the mildewed ruins of an extensive library. Hancock squatted near the edge and looked down at the ruined books.

"That's a shame," Hancock grumbled quietly. "Think of all the fun we could have had with those."

A loud peal of thunder and a warning screech from the ship's plates striking against the dock drowned out any answer Nick might have given. On the horizon that orange glow kept strengthening, sending flickering shadows over the ship. The ship had been creaking the whole time they had been approaching it; now it seemed to twist against the mud and dock holding it in place, rocking slightly to one side. Hancock cast a worried glance at Nick but said nothing. The two went through the first door they came across and found themselves in an immense room filled with darkened consoles, fuses and wiring and terminals as far as the eye could see, taking up the entire top deck. Nick knelt and wiped a thick layer of dirt away from one of the floor panels near the window.

"I heard about this I think," he said. "Solar power floor panels. That's why it's all glass up here. The boys at work were talking about it; one of my coworkers had a brother stationed on a ship like this, the Westek Fullton. Said the damn thing took up so much power even the fusion generators weren't enough to run all the experiments the scientists were doing. They were experimenting with using these panels to make energy out of sunlight somehow."

"What the hell were they doing?"

"Dunno. His brother was just there to guard the brains. They said security was tight though, real tight. Said his ship had computers everywhere too. Something about trying to compile all the data they knew into files on holotape, shipping them to some bunker somewhere in case of apocalypse."

"What I wouldn't give to find that bunker. Come on." Hancock gestured towards a stairway leading down into darkness. “The way this old tub is shifting around makes me nervous.”

The next deck down seemed to be reserved for labs. Room after room filled with chemistry stations, cabinets with rows of samples in glass bottles, vats whose liquids had bubbled down to solid sludge decades ago. The hall seemed to be one long oval, running between labs on either side. Finally they came to a set of rooms with black plastic plaques riveted next to the doors. The first was PW 1.

Silently the two men entered the room. Near the back, an enormous tank of water caught Nick's flashlight beam. Through the murky water the two men could barely make out the form of a naked man's torso sewn to octopus tentacles. The creature had gills implanted in its chest, rows of neat black stitches connecting the flaps of skin to its torso. Hancock knocked on the glass. Nick jumped back.

"Are you crazy? No, never mind, I know you are."

"Relax," Hancock said. "Notice it didn't move. I think it's dead."

"And if it hadn't been?"

He shrugged. "We woulda dealt with it. Always do."

"Just do me a favor and warn me before you do anything suicidal again," Nick said as he picked up a folder with PW 1 on it and stuffed it into his bag. A little light reading for later, maybe. He always had wondered what Westek was up to that had them mostly using ships for their experiments, traveling from one port to another and staying, for the most part, in international waters where law got...murky. 

PW 2 held another human-sized tank, this one housing a rail thin woman with a tail and large fox ears. Her clawed hands had left long gouges on the glass. She had been mostly mummified, her skin shriveled inward on what was left of her bones. Another folder for Nick’s bag. PW 3 was more of the same, another man, this one just bones by now. Too many bones for a human, including some arranged in what appeared to be the curve of a tail. The ship lurched to one side again as thunder sounded loud enough to echo in the bowels of the ship, and Nick could almost swear he saw the tail twitch.

"No wonder security was tight," Nick muttered. 

"What were they even trying to do? This doesn't make sense to me."

"Making super soldiers maybe. I heard from a coworker that back during the war the military found all kinds of questionable bio experiments at the Westek facilities on the ground." Nick held his hands out helplessly. "Why they'd go to all this trouble when they had power armor and stealth boys and pip boys? I don't know. There was a lot of--erm, unusual--activity during the war."

"Apparently."

 

They passed the rest of the labs in silence, peering in to see more skeletons in tanks, Nick snatching the folders he happened to see on his way past. Periodically the ship groaned and shifted against the dock. The howling of the wind sounded almost like a live thing now, and the orange glow through the portholes made the whole place seem like the inside of one big oven. Nick’s sensors were almost at the point of overload with the fears that rolled through his processor. What if they were already too late and whatever was in PW 12 was gone? What if it was still there, but the ship broke away from the land just as they found it, leaving them to slowly sink out in the water? What if they found it, but while smuggling it out they found another experiment, this one alive and pissed off? As they passed PW 10, the ship rocked violently enough that Hancock stumbled against a wall. He waved Nick away. "Had worse tumbles than that when I was drunk. But we might better hurry if we're going to find this thing."

Finally they arrived at PW 12. Hancock took a deep breath. "Still think it’s files?”

"Still think it’s chems?" Nick's hands itched to light another cigarette, but he refrained. No telling what kinds of chemicals might have been spilled around here, or if any of them were still flammable. Before he could rethink it, he pushed the door to PW 12 open.

 

The first difference they noted in this room was that it wasn't tomb-silent like the others. There was a steady, rhythmic hiss coming from a machine under the tank here. The other was that the tank was glowing. As they watched, nozzles at the top of the tank sprayed a glowing turquoise mist; a few seconds after it stopped, an IV tube drained a familiar amber fluid. Nick trained the flashlight on two immense metal canisters under the tank. One was labeled "radium". The other, "RadAway". The two nozzles continued to cycle every few seconds, endlessly. Nick studied the tubing running between the canisters and the tank.

As they approached it, they noticed a figure inside covered from head to toe in a black sheet. Underneath the figure, which appeared to be levitating a few inches over the bottom of the tank, drains led to the tubing. Nick watched as the radium was sprayed, then drained into the clear plastic tubing that led back to the radium tank during the pause. He heard a hum, then watched a miniscule dose of RadAway glide up the IV toward the figure under the black sheet. 

"I'm about to do something suicidal again," Hancock said, and rapped on the glass. The figure under the sheet seemed to jerk, then was still again, the only sign of life the gentle swaying of its chest as it breathed. "Think this is what Mama Murphy sent us for?"

"Maybe," Nick muttered as he stuffed a folder from the table beside the tank into his bag. "Only one way to find out."

He studied the tank. A bank of fusion cores linked together with copper wiring were attached to a switch at the head of the tank. He flipped the switch and watched the figure under the sheet drop. It groaned.

Hancock gingerly pushed the lid of the tank up. The two looked at each other, as if daring each other to be the first to pull the sheet back, but it was Hancock who finally made the move. He peeled back the sheet slowly, revealing the figure a piece at a time.

The first thing to be revealed was hair, a thick gleaming braid of a purple so deep it was almost black. Next came pale skin faintly marbled with slightly glowing greenish veins. Hancock's tongue crept out to lick what was left of his lips. Already he could imagine trailing his tongue along those veins, searching out where they ended up. Finely arched brows, tattooed cat's eye eyeliner, high cheekbones and a pointed chin gave the woman a feline aspect. The lips were full and dark. Tubes ran into needles bored into her veins on both arms, at least five of them in all. One went to the RadAway. He supposed the rest might be fluids or nutritional supplements to keep the woman from dying. 

The woman opened her eyes, and Hancock froze. Her eyes glowed in the dark, the pale yellowish green of the sky during a rad storm. But the color seemed to swirl with little hints of brighter yellow or cooler blue here and there. He expected her to scream maybe, seeing a ghoul and a robot instead of whoever she might have been expecting. Instead her brows knit together in confusion as she sat up, pushing the sheet back the rest of the way to reveal a suit with copper wire woven through it, clinging to luscious curves of breast and hip. He had heard of an hourglass figure, but this was the first time for him to see one so clearly defined. She dangled her legs off the edge of the tank and popped her neck.

"So," she said, her voice hoarse from years of disuse, "I presume Martin is not available." She started ripping needles out of her arms, none too gently. The blood that began to flow held a phosphorescent green glow. Hancock thought of the Glowing Ones he had fought with Nate. 

"Who's Martin," Nick asked.

"The scientist in charge of my, erm, case. He said he'd have Chairman Meow here to meet me when he...woke me. What happened?"

"Chairman Mao? Are you working with the Chinese," Nick asked, shocked.

"Not Mao. Meow. Like a cat?" She made a little meowing sound. "My best friend. Orange fur, long tail, about a foot tall. Have you seen him?"

"Lady, I don't know how long you've been in there, but there are a few things you're probably not going to like," Hancock said.

"So what else is new? Hit me," she replied, stretching her limbs slowly. Hancock couldn't help but notice that even after so long of being still, she was very limber, bending her hands back so far her fingertips almost touched the backs of her arms. He wondered how far that flexibility extended. Good thing she wouldn't be able to see him blush under the remnants of his skin.

"When did you go in there, doll," Nick asked.

"December of 2076."

"Oh boy," Hancock muttered, and started rummaging through his bag for some Calmex, Medex, Jet, anything. This was liable to turn ugly.

The ship juddered beneath them again, this time with a long resounding screech.

"Now is not the time," Nick said. "Do you, uhm, have anything to pack?"

"Pack? What's going on?"

"It's later than you think, sister," Hancock said. "This ship's rotting in place. We gotta get going."

Her eyes narrowed, but she slid down from the tank and pulled a vacuum-packed plastic bag out of the desk by the door. "Nothing to pack. The only thing I had worth anything was Chairman Meow, and other than some clothes he's all I brought with me from my apartment. By later than I think, do you mean late enough that a cat would be expected to be gone?"

"Oh yeah," Hancock muttered. "Long gone."

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "All right then. Let me get out of this magnetic suit and we'll leave. Don’t want me to be getting stuck to all the metal in sight while we’re trying to make a run for it."

Nick made for the door to give her privacy to change. Hancock stood there as still as a lump on a log until Nick simulated clearing his throat and pulled him toward the door. Hancock shrugged and winked at Nick as if to say, do you blame me for trying? Nick shook his head at the ghoul and mouthed careful. The woman was still an unknown entity and although she hadn’t seemed to show much response to her abrupt wakeup call, Nick knew from his detective work--before and after the war--that sometimes it was the ones who seemed to take bad news the best who had the most spectacular breakdowns later. 

Quicker than he would have thought, she was stepping out the door again, hands empty. Nick felt something in his processor stutter as he got a good look at her. A loose tank top stopped just above the waistband of a particularly short black leather skirt with the remains of laces up its sides. A pair of leather boots with platform heels went all the way up to mid thigh; silver charms dangled from the laces of the boots. She brushed past the two, who were both stunned into siilence, and gestured for them to follow.

“Keep up gentlemen. You said time is of the essence. The main exit is this way.” 

The synth and the ghoul stared at each other for a moment. “I haven’t seen a getup like that outside of the prewar red light district when I used to work vice, before I made detective,” Nick muttered.

Hancock grinned. “Looks like those ladies could teach our ladies of the evening a thing or two about presentation.” 

Nick lightly smacked Hancock on the back of his head, then gestured toward the rapidly retreating woman and started walking. Readjusting his tricorn with a wolfish grin, Hancock followed.


	3. Chapter 3

By the time they reached the upper deck again, the ship was practically shrieking as its plates rubbed against each other. It moved constantly now, and as they came into the room with the terminals and the broken windows, they could instantly tell why; the wind blew through the holes in the glass with enough force to actually move chairs, holotapes, desk lamps. None of them bothered speaking; the howl of the wind would have overpowered their voices anyway. The orange glow was frenetic now, and through the left side of the ship Nick could see what all the fuss was about: a funnel cloud that looked to be miles wide was headed for them, slowly but steadily. Flames twisted up the sides of it and into the sky. Lightning flashed continuously in the sky, electric pulses of purple and blue standing stark contrast to the flames. The woman stopped dead in her tracks, staring, mouth ajar. Nick pulled at her hand, trying to move her to the little boat they had used to reach the ship, but she was surprisingly rooted. Hancock waved a hand in front of her eyes and pointed toward the door; she finally started moving again, but more slowly this time, her eyes still trained on the storm. Rain fell in glittering orange sheets and as soon as they left the shelter of the roof, they were soaked through. Nick reached the ship’s railing and looked down at the water. The boat they had used to get here was worthless now, snapped in half and mostly sunken, presumably during one of the ship’s sideways rolls. He couldn’t even hear himself curse over the storm. 

The woman, finally getting over her daze, grabbed his hand and pointed at the buildings across from them, then mimed jumping and swimming. Then without waiting for a response, she started climbing down the ladder. Hancock had already started climbing down another of the ladders a few feet away.

The followed her through the water into what appeared to be a small shop. Gaudy costume jewelry glittered behind dust-laden glass counters. The rotted remnants of clothes clung to rusted hangers. She led them back through a storeroom and into another street, then through another building--this one the lobby of an old apartment building--and into yet another street. In their third building, a small diner with moldering cakes still sitting behind the glass counters, Nick grabbed at her.

“Wait a minute,” he said, now that they could hear each other over the din. “Where are we going? Do you have any vaults around here?”

“Are you crazy,” she asked. “Water table’s so high here you can’t even bury people under the ground.” She glanced down at the water that was up to almost the tops of her boots. “And apparently it’s only gotten worse since I started the project.”

“Then where are we going to go,” Hancock asked. “That storm is going to be here any minute.”

“I’ve got a place in mind, sirs. Follow me or don’t, but don’t waste my time with questions. Move your asses if you want to keep them intact.”

Hancock bristled. “I’m not in the habit of blindly following…”

“A mausoleum, numbnuts. Nothing in there for the fire to burn, stone walls that will hopefully stand up to the wind, not many windows to blow out and the ones that are there are colored plexiglass because they kept having trouble with vandals breaking the real glass. Good enough for you?”

Hancock smiled at her. “Quick thinking. And if we die, at least we’ll already be in an appropriate spot for burial.”

She shook her head at him, but smiled, then kept going. She took them in a straight line, plowing through or over whatever stood in their way, from the remains of stalled cars to shops and even a laundromat. Every time they entered the outside again, the luminous rain pelted them and the wind tore at their clothes and hair. The roar of the storm seemed to get louder, and as Nick looked back he could tell it was gaining on them. He was on the verge of asking if there was anywhere closer they could go when he spotted their destination: a graveyard surrounded by scrolled iron fences and warped trees laden with moss. He followed her past tall rectangular buildings and realized these must be the above ground graves he had read about prewar: brick edifices just tall enough to stack four or five coffins on top of each other on shelves. She led them through a maze of these, past a few crumbled ones with bones and bits of wood tumbling out into the water, past a small ruined gazebo, and finally toward a large marble building on top of a hill. Pillars topped with acanthus leaf motifs jutted up into a copper ceiling that had become encrusted with pale green weathering. Immense, iron-reinforced gates stood open, revealing a darkness so absolute Nick was sure it might lead to the gates of hell itself. Fearlessly the woman dove into the darkness. Nick and Hancock hesitated at the door.

Nick almost pulled his pistol when a pale hand flung itself out of the darkness and dragged him in by his trenchcoat, but realized that it had to be her. A few moments later the three of them were inside, leaned against the now closed iron doors and panting in soft light from Nick’s flashlight. It was surprisingly quiet in here with the doors shut, the only sound a dull roar of the rain pattering on the stone roof. Nick clicked on the flashlight, revealing a cavernous space of marble, copper, and iron. Copper name plaques gleamed like new behind plexiglass. Dead flowers jutted from marble vases carved into the walls between the names. Dimly he realized that the hill they were on was high enough that the mausoleum itself wasn’t flooded. He watched the woman stalk past marble benches towards a hallway at the very back, where a skeleton in a wheelchair sat transfixed before one of the name plaques, a bouquet of dried roses withered in its lap. She passed the skeleton without comment and went to the last plaque in the bottom left corner of the building, this one blank of any name. He watched her take a screwdriver from the empty vase near the plaque and unscrew the large brass screws holding the square marble front onto the crypt. Silently she pulled the square out. The screws at each corner of the square fitted into telescoping brass rods; as she pulled on the square the rods kept it in place and it moved with surprisingly steady, fluid ease. Behind it he glimpsed a couple of green duffle bags. 

“I guess that must be your secret cache, huh,” Hancock asked.

She shrugged. “Didn’t make sense to keep an apartment when I knew I was going to be gone so long and Martin was keeping Chairman Meow for me. He swore to me he wouldn’t let any of them touch him. Lots of them kept pets, usually fish or birds, but there were a couple of dogs too. I figured Meow would get along with his parrot just fine.” She sat cross legged on the floor and pulled a lantern out of one of the bags. Nick lit it for her.

Hancock sat next to her. “How’d you know there wouldn’t be a corpse in there? I mean I know there’s not a name on the plate, but how’d you know they wouldn’t put one in there while you were asleep?”

“Because it’s my grave,” she said matter-of-factly. “I bought my place here with some of the first money I made. They can evict you from an apartment, but if you have a grave like this, you can always keep your valuables in it. Who the hell else would think of looking there for them?”

“You have a point,” Hancock muttered. “Care for a chem break?” He pulled an inhaler of Jet out of his pocket.

She raised one eyebrow at him. “I’m not even going to ask where you got that. But don’t let anybody from the Minotaurs see you with that. They mark all theirs with blue paint, and if you don’t buy from them they get a little...persnickety.”

He smiled at her, somewhat amused. “I doubt they’re still in business.”

“I forgot,” she muttered. She grew quiet. She started rummaging through her packs, laying out a machete, cans of purified water, tins of food, a first aid kit. Silently she started to sharpen her machete.

Sighing, Nick sat on the other side of her and leaned his head back against the wall. A small multicolored window across from them swirled with light from the storm outside, but other than that and the sound of the rain, this place was the calmest he’d been in weeks. Maybe years. He looked over at her from the corner of his eye, but she focused entirely on sharpening her blade, looking at neither of them. She didn’t seem to want to discuss anything, and far be it from him to force her. He was a gentleman, after all. 

Nick’s internal chronometer kept the time precisely, as it always did. But he saw no point in telling them that, judging by the light in the window, the main storm surrounded them for approximately four and a half hours. The storm was immense and slow moving. He tried to imagine what might be happening out there. Would the flames riding the wind burn everything down, or would the heavy rain mean the flammables would only be singed a little? How much of the city would be blown down by the winds? Would the flooding get much worse? He kept expecting the water to start creeping into their shelter, and after about two hours it did, but it stayed mainly in a shallow puddle at the iron doors. Other than some rusty stains on the floor by those same doors, and the ever-present blanket of dust that cloaked all ruins, the mausoleum was almost pristine; nothing a determined settler with a bucket of water and a dishrag couldn’t fix. He supposed there must have been storms out here before in the past two centuries, and since the inside of this place was still so clean and intact he figured it must be one of the safest places to hole up in town. He wasn’t sure if she had somehow sensed that or if she had merely thought of the place because it was where she hid what belongings she had, but he supposed it didn’t matter. They weren’t going to be able to get anywhere else fast, so they might as well shelter in place. 

To his amazement, although the woman had just gotten up from a 200 year nap, she soon curled up on the floor, using one of her bags for a pillow, and went to sleep. Hancock glanced at him, shrugged, then copied her. 

“Don’t worry,” Nick muttered to him. “I’ll stand watch.”

“No need,” Hancock said, and yawned. “Nobody’s gonna be able to get through that mess out there but a deathclaw. And if they have those here, we’d definitely know when it came bursting in through those doors.”

Nick was determined to keep watch anyway.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time sunlight came, the two had only been sleeping for a couple of hours. Nick glanced at them. Hancock, he knew, had been burning the candle at both ends for weeks. The woman may have just woken from some induced experimental slumber, but judging by the darkness under her eyes and the way she had nodded off so easily, it hadn’t been nearly as restful as true sleep. He remembered how she had twitched when Hancock had rapped on the glass and wondered how far under she’d really been all this time.

Besides, he had plenty of reading material to keep him busy. He felt a little unsure about reading file PW 12. He wasn’t sure how much she would want to share with him, or if she would consider it prying for him to read her case. He didn’t know her well enough yet to tell what her reaction might be. Was she the forgiving sort? Somehow, a woman who had little to no personal belongings and no friends except a long dead cat didn’t seem like the kind of woman he should possibly anger. She might take it into her head to go off alone, and with her being so unfamiliar with the way the world was now, that might just be a death sentence.

If not for her, perhaps for those she’d come across. He hadn’t forgotten that Westek’s primary researches had been for better warfare. He did allow himself to glance at the title page, just to see if there was perhaps a clue, something to whet his intellectual appetite. “Operation Winter’s Flame.” He chuckled to himself. His old life had ended with a Winter; only fitting that he might come across another. He hoped this one wouldn’t be as traumatic as the last Winter he’d met. Was that her real last name? Or just a code designation?

He put the file aside and started with PW 1.

 

_Operation Neptune’s Emissary_

_Purpose: This project’s stated aim is to create a soldier capable of underwater espionage, sabotage, and other naval necessities that average soldiers may not be capable of. It is this lab’s intention to create a soldier who can descend to any depths to find and destroy submarines, particularly Chinese. Many of our enemies have created vast navies and it is our belief that these navies include underwater mines that endanger our ships, submarines that carry hostile forces and weapons, and possibly the use of underwater technologies for eavesdropping on our naval communications._

_Intended Process: Granting the soldier gills should eliminate the need for an oxygen tank, making him more mobile and eliminating bubble trails that can give away his position. Grafting octopus tentacles onto the soldier in place of legs will not only make him more streamlined for swimming but will also give him extra limbs to use for multitasking. The soldier will be trained in the art of placing, detonating, and disarming explosives. Dr Walthers is currently researching dolphin brains to discover how we might give the soldier the sense of echolocation, which would aid immensely in his navigation of dark deep water environments. We have been able to implant a sonar emitting tube in subject’s throat but have not yet determined how to make him able to sense the return waves. Dr Walthers has also mentioned that the study of bats may yield pertinent information._

_Subject: Joshua Mathers. Age: 23. Former occupation: cashier at a gambling establishment in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Subject came to the attention of the psywar program after we received a tip from our field agents that he had been kicked out of multiple gambling establishments in Las Vegas, Reno, Dallas, and New Orleans on suspicions of cheating, but none of the businesses could ever figure out how he was doing it. Subject never played against human opponents; only played blackjack against robotic opponents or played slot machines. Upon investigation learned that subject had talent for interfacing with machinery and was able to use the power of his mind to ensure that slot machines paid out. Dr Mathers immediately thought he would be a good subject to work with in regards to any projects involving electronics such as mines, bombs, or other explosives. Extensive background checks revealed three minor infractions of the law, all three of them involving breaking and entering._

_Surgical plans: electronics division can create a set of "gills" that will easily break water molecules apart into their hydrogen and oxygen components, storing the excess hydrogen in a bladder that the subject can periodically empty once we implant it behind the gills and putting the oxygen directly into the blood stream. Biologics has taken a sample of the subject's skin from left inner thigh and is using it, along with stem cells and an undisclosed process using electrophoresis, to create a skin lining for the gills to prevent the body from rejecting them. The same skin lining process will be used with the tentacles of an octopus to prevent rejection by subject’s immune system. Subject will be placed under mild sedation with IV valium and have all implants attached. Subject will be kept in tank in lab for first few months of his service so that his responses to his augmentations and his mental status can be assessed, with removal from tank twice daily for two hours each for training._

_Day One: Subject survived surgery with no notable unforeseen reactions. Heartbeat and respirations returned to normal within thirty minutes of surgery's end. Subject placed in tank in lab and tank filled with sea water. For approximately ten minutes after subject's head was covered with water and the lid fitted to tank, subject thrashed, apparently believing that he still needed air. Lid kept on tank to prevent subject from using his previously accustomed method of respiration; it is believed by Dr Mathers that the sooner he gets used to his gills the faster his training will go. Subject beat on glass for approximately six minutes after tank lid placed. After a period of unconsciousness, subject became more alert, but was unable or unwilling to respond to Dr Mathers's taps on his tank. Took thirty minutes for subject to become responsive again._

_Day Two: Began first training session today. Subject complains of pain in eyes related to salinity of water. Complains of constant headaches and chest pains; Dr Mathers suggests it is possibly his body's instinctual desire to use his former means of respiration while under water. Subject attempted to fight when placed back in tank and had to be forcibly inserted; Dr Mathers has decided that he should be left in tank for next 48 hours as punishment. At that time will try again with training session._

Nick stopped reading and tossed the file to the side. He couldn't take much more of that particular horrorshow, thank you very much. He didn’t have to breathe in his synth body, but from memories of the human Nick’s life he could well imagine the sensations that "subject" would have undergone during his time in the tank. The panic, the tightness in the chest, the darkness blooming behind his eyelids; it was almost enough to make Nick short of breath himself, even without lungs. 

But one of the many things Nick hated about himself was that no matter how grim the truth was, he had this perverse and unfathomable need to know. He couldn't any more throw away file PW 2 without looking at it than he could have put a bullet in his head or left John to fend for himself. Nick just wasn't built that way. He busied his hands with cleaning his shoes, then with picking the loose threads from the cuffs of his pants, but his glowing yellow eyes kept straying to that damned folder, and before he realized what he was doing he had it in front of his face, about ready to open it.

Fortunately the woman chose that moment to wake. Her breathing sped up and in the same instant her eyes snapped open, fully aware and alert. The sleepy lethargy that John usually had upon first waking, and that Nick could vaguely remember from the human Nick, was nowhere in evidence. She looked like a woman ready for a fight, right out of the gate. She looked at the folder, then looked up at him, one eyebrow raised.

"Where'd you get that, sir?"

"I, ah...well it's not yours. I mean, if you were wondering. I mean, I did pick up yours, but this one isn't it." _Swell job you're doing so far, Valentine,_ he thought. "It's one of the other projects they were working on."

“But you have mine, huh?” 

“Well, yes, I do. But I promise I haven’t read it.”

“Why?”

He blinked at her. “What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, why do you care if I think you read it? Not like I could stop you. Why do you care if I know?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Because it’s information about you. It might be personal. I wouldn’t want you to think I’d been prying.”

She laughed. “First guy I ever met that gave a damn about what I wanted instead of worrying about what he wanted. You’re an odd duck Mr...what is your name, anyway?”

“Nick Valentine, at your service. The well dressed ghoul over there is John Hancock. Not his original name, I’m sure you gather, but it fits him.”

She looked at the hand he held out to her for a moment before shaking it. “Lydia Belmont. How about we start with you telling me just how long it’s been that I’ve been absent from the world, and trying to fill me in on what’s happened?”

Nick’s hand searched for his cigarette packet of its own accord. This was going to be a doozy.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time Hancock awoke, Nick had filled Lydia in on his own backstory, starting with waking up in the Institute trash heap and ending with he and Nate standing at the spot at which Jenny had been murdered just to send him a message. He explained how Nate had taken down the Institute, with some help, and talked about the Railroad’s ongoing efforts to promote human-synth peace. He described deathclaws as “pissed off dinos” and reminisced about the time that Nate had found a deathclaw egg at a museum, then promptly returned it to its parent, saying that every parent deserved to hold their children tight for as long as they could. Lydia mentioned that they sounded kind of like alligators, which she claimed were great mothers, prompting Nick to tell her the tale of the gator they had seen on their way to the ship. John awoke to the sound of Lydia laughing as Nick told her the story of a colleague human Nick had who had dressed up as an alligator for Halloween every year, and had then dressed the alligator costume in yet another costume, like sexy nurse or pirate. Bob Haskell. He had been fun.

Hancock loved the sound of the two laughing together. He loved Nick. Nick was too blind to see it, always thinking he wasn’t good enough for anyone, even an addict ghoul with a taste for adventure. Or maybe John just wasn’t Nick’s type, and he was too kind to say so. He had an inkling he could come to love Lydia, too. When she laughed, her eyes, already glowing, seemed to sparkle with a million different shades. The sound of his first hit of Jet for the morning brought the pair’s attention to him. He grinned at them. 

“So,” Lydia said after a short silence. “You’re John Hancock, mayor of Goodneighbor I heard.” 

“Good to know my name has traveled all the way down here,” John said with a wink.

“I told her that, you ass,” Nick muttered. 

“Nick mentioned that you were the jackass of the pair,” Lydia said. “Something about almost getting you guys shot over a piece of ass back in Mississippi?”

Hancock’s grin grew wider. “Why, you want to see what it was like up close and personal?”

She cocked one eyebrow at him. “I hear bottlecaps are the currency of the kingdom now. Just can’t seem to square the idea of selling my services for bottlecaps. I’d have no idea how much to charge.” 

Nick’s processor ground to a halt. That would explain the clothes, he supposed. And the purple hair. No proper woman prewar would have been caught dead with any shade other than their natural color or a platinum blonde or fiery red that could only come out of a bottle. Purple? Out of the question. 

“Before this conversation goes off the rails,” Nick finally managed, “I might remind you two that you probably should have some breakfast. And no, John, jet doesn’t count. We did an awful lot of running last night. I think we still have some of those dried noodles Takahashi packaged up for us.”

Lydia got a wistful expression on her face. “Too bad the World Cafe is gone. I could really go for a beignet right about now. And coffee. Oh god, coffee.” 

Neither man answered. Hancock because he was busy trying to figure out if he had any way to simulate coffee with chems and just what the hell a beignet was. Nick because the sultry way she said the word coffee ought to be illegal in all 13 commonwealths. He could well imagine some of the other things she might say in that tone. Especially if she was serious about her former trade. 

He shook himself and wordlessly pulled out the noodles, starting the process of cooking. If Hancock noticed anything unusual in his sudden desire to cook, he didn’t say anything about it. 

“So,” John asked later, mouth full of noodles, “what’s the plan?”

Lydia looked down at the floor, suddenly quiet. “I don’t have one. When I went into that tank, the plan was I’d emerge for training a year or so later, then go to work for the military.” She shrugged. “Now that there’s no military? I guess I’m...obsolete.” 

“So you went in there willingly,” Nick asked in spite of himself. That damned curiosity again. 

“I did. I don’t think all of us did, but me…” she shrugged. “I didn’t have any reason not to. No family, no permanent house, nobody but Meow. And even he didn’t really need me. He was just a stray I picked up after we caught each other standing at the same corner one too many times when he was a kitten. He would have been fine without me.”

John stared at her. “Well, were they paying you real good?”

She shrugged again. “We never discussed money. Money didn’t really matter. I could always find that.”

_Yeah,_ Nick thought, _I bet you could. Girl like you could have had a sugar daddy if you wanted._ He was immediately ashamed of himself for the thought. He had no idea if she really even had been a...lady of the night. And if she had, he had no idea what reasons she might have had. Hell, any judgment on his part might just be some holdover from the detective he’d been modeled after. Nick the synth had never had any feelings towards prostitutes, one way or another. He’d been too busy trying to figure out who he was and how to make a life without people trying to kill him at every turn because they were scared that the big bad robot was going to get them. 

But then a memory flashed into his mind and   
_  
The human Nick was getting his wallet and his now-empty lunch pail out of his locker, ready to go home for the evening to his empty apartment again in Chicago. Before Jenny. Before he made detective, back when he was just a rookie working the street. Two of the detectives from Vice were at their lockers, getting ready for the end of their shift, too, and they were laughing._

_“Well, that kind of woman, damn right she owes us a little something too. For keeping the real dirtbags off of her. She wanted to be a decent girl she’d settle down with a husband like the rest of the broads.”_

_“You see how big her eyes got when you told her she had some options to keep her from getting brought in, and all of them ended with her on her knees?” They laughed again, a low nasty sound deep in their throats._

_“Well there’s some things you just don’t ask your wife to do, Martin. Some things you save for a woman like that.”_

_The human Nick, catching on to what they were talking about, to what they had made a prostitute do to stay out of trouble, felt that familiar tightening on the back of his neck. That feeling told him it was time to get off by himself somewhere before he started swinging his fists. But before he could even help himself he was turning, his mouth was opening, as if of its own accord._

_“I know I don’t hear two of Chicago’s finest talking about using their status to coerce a woman into a compromising position. Especially not in front of a rookie when they’re supposed to be setting an example. I must be mistaken. Maybe time to get my ears cleaned.”_

_“You can’t coerce a woman like that Nicky. Can’t rape a whore. Anybody wasn’t a rookie would already know that. And if he didn’t want to stay a rookie…”_

But Nick the synth’s memories were interrupted here by a nudge from John. He realized that he’d been clenching his fists hard enough that it would have left dents if his casing wasn’t so pliable. He was left with the same feeling Nick the human had then; disgust, rage, and more than a little sorrow. Whether for the now long-dead woman or for the sorry state of the human race, he wasn’t sure. He got the sense that this memory was the first time that the human Nick had realized that cops were just people too, and some people sucked, regardless of whether or not they had a badge. He knows from his fragmentary memories that there had been plenty of good people on the force with him, honest people who had wanted to make a difference. But there had also been assholes like those two from vice, people who only sought badges because they wanted to see how much they could get away with, how much they could take from the common people. Nick also had the sense he had spent several months on the shittiest jobs the two in vice could come up with for him, but had felt no regrets over speaking up. Rather, he’d regretted not doing more.

“You okay there, Detective,” John asked teasingly.

Nick nodded. "Just shook a few cobwebs loose from the old databanks," he muttered. He noticed that Lydia seemed awkward, maybe embarrassed? There was a lull as they all felt each other’s moods out. Finally she said, “I had my reasons for going into the program. Everyone who went in did. Do you know what their program was really about?”

Nick shook his head. 

“Psychic warfare. They were trying to figure out how to use anomalies as war toys.”

“What kind of anomalies?”

“Well….I used to know this girl. Her name was Caitlin. And she had this talent for finding things. It went beyond just luck, or using logic. She used to work down at one of the restaurants in the Quarter, real touristy place. People were always leaving behind cameras, passports, bags, whatever. But sometimes they didn’t leave them with her restaurant. And she had this way about her...she could just tell somehow. When you were missing something. She would look at them and just tell them, flat out, stuff like ‘you left it at the zoo on the counter where you bought the taffy,’ or wherever it was. And she was always right. Every time. These people, some of them didn’t even realize they had lost the item yet. They certainly weren’t telling her their entire travel history. But she knew.”

“Bet Westek would have loved to get their hands on that one.” 

“They did. She was in PW 11, right next to me. She said they planned to put some implants in her brain and eyes, give her the ability to see infrared, and heat vision, stuff like that. Said she was going to train for espionage, finding enemy hideouts, that kind of thing. She went in willingly too. But she went in because she was patriotic. Thought she should help win the war effort.”

“And how did you feel about the war,” Hancock asked.

“I thought it was stupid. Idiot children fighting over the toys when they should have been getting together to figure out how to make more. God knows we had the tech for it. Had plenty of scientists. If all the brains had gotten together to try to figure out how to solve hunger and the energy crisis and all of that, we would be having a very different conversation right now. All that energy and intelligence? They used it to try to figure out new and novel ways of killing people. That was their big accomplishment.”

Nick grimaced. “Too many people rely on violence to solve their problems. Only have to look around to see where that got us.”

“What was your special talent,” Hancock asked.

Nick could swear he saw her blush. It was the faintest tinge of pink on her pale cheeks, but it was enough for him to notice it. “Let’s just say I have a lot of...talents.”

Hancock, being who he was, grinned at her. “Do they have anything to do with your former, ah, career?”

She looked up at him sharply, then barked out a surprised laugh. “No, Mr Mayor, I wasn’t recruited by Westek for sex.” She gave them a searching glance before finally admitting, “I thought you wouldn’t believe me, but considering that one of you was built in a lab and one of you has dubbed himself the king of the zombies, maybe you will be a little more open minded than I was afraid.”

“Well, go on,” Nick said. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“I’m a good old fashioned witch, fellas.”


	6. Chapter 6

Hancock’s reaction was immediate. “Well, all right sister. Here I thought we were going to have to get you a gun. Turns out, the reason you’re not packing heat, is because you are the heat.” 

Her blush deepened. “It’s...not like you used to see on tv. I mean, I don’t wiggle my nose and cause stuff to just happen. And most of the time it gives me a headache to do anything too big without going through a lot of rigamarole first. Martin said he thinks the rituals give my brain time to amp the energy required for the spell up slowly, but when I rush it through in a blast, that’s what causes the headache. But…” she shrugged. “That’s what the radiation treatment you saw was about.”

“I don’t get it,” Hancock said. “I’m a ghoul, I practically live on radiation now, and I can’t do any fancy spells.”

Lydia looked amused. “Have you ever tried?”

“Well, no, but I…”

“Then you wouldn’t know, would you? Either of you.”

“Try to explain it to us anyway, Doll. And give us the simplified version. We aren’t stupid, but we aren’t exactly big science lab guys either.”

She took one of the forks they’d been using on the noodles and started drawing in the dust. The diagrams looked suspiciously like the kind the Children of Atom painted their faces with. “Okay, so, you know how everything is made up of atoms? And atoms are made of electrons and other interesting stuff? All the way back in the thirties--the _1930s_ \--they came up with this theory. Quantum physics. Basically the theory is, that at its base level, everything in the world is energy. Our thoughts? Electricity jumping around in our brain, from one cell to another. Everything physical? Break it down far enough, it’s pure energy, vibrating at different frequencies.”

“So I guess that explains why they could make a thinking robot, then,” Nick mused. “If human thoughts are electricity moving around, I guess your thoughts and mine aren’t that different, in terms of how they’re made.” 

“So if thoughts are energy, and reality is energy,” Hancock said, “You could use one type of energy to affect the other.”

She clapped her hands together and smiled at them. “And you thought you’d need fancy science degrees to get it. If you can sense the different energies, really sense them, you can manipulate them.”

“So do you have a fancy science degree,” Hancock asked.

“Me? Hardly. I read a lot, and I’ve had a lot of talks with Martin, but I’m still not entirely sure why it works. I only know that it does.”

“We went to a museum of witchcraft once in Salem,” Nick offered. “Me and the General. They never explained what witches actually do.”

She seemed perpetually amused now. “Mostly the same stuff you’d do. Sleep, read, watch movies. With the occasional spell to avoid catastrophe thrown in.”

“You didn’t say what the radiation treatments had to do with that,” Hancock said.

“Radiation is high-level energy. Martin figured if they kept pumping radiation through my system they might be able to get my body used to running higher levels of energy, so I could increase my abilities. He also figured he better keep the RadAway going through my system to keep me from going crazy.”

“Wait...they had ferals before the war,” Nick asked.

“If feral means homicidal, then yes. At least, they did at Westek apparently. I wasn’t the first one they tried to use radiation on. Everybody else they tried it on went crazy and tried to eat the researchers. That’s why they figured they’d try again, but with time with RadAway between exposures. Martin said they’d start with small doses of radiation over longer periods of time, then increase the amount of radiation and reduce the time between exposures. Of course, I was only supposed to be in there about a year. I guess the experiment ran a little longer than that.” 

Hancock smirked. “I guess so. Have you, uh, thought about trying it out yet?” He thought about one of the few times he had run across an actual Glowing One, about the waves of radioactive energy they could pulse out of their bodies from seemingly nowhere. Thought about how Fahrenheit had sworn to him once that she had seen one of those energy pulses bring nearby ghouls back from the dead. He wondered if Lydia could be his own personal resurrectionist. 

“Not yet. No real call for it.” 

“You could try it now,” Nick suggested, hoping she didn’t take his eagerness to see it for a sign that he didn’t believe her. But he had never met someone who claimed to be a witch before. He supposed it was possible--in a world where synths and ghouls could be practically immortal, where harmless house flies and mosquitoes had morphed into giant killers, where Mama Murphy’s Sight proved right time after time...why the hell not?

She stared at her hands for a moment, as if they were foreign to her. “I could I suppose. But...it’s been so long. I’m not sure I could do anything anymore, even if I tried. Just give me some time to think.”

She closed her eyes and seemed to sink into herself, her chin lowering to her chest. Nick and John stared at each other for a moment, feeling awkward. Slowly she started to rock back and forth on her haunches, muttering under her breath in a foreign language. Nick thought it might sound like French. He had vague recollections of Jenny wanting to take French lessons with him, wanting to have their honeymoon in Paris. He winced against the memory. He guessed there wasn’t going to be any honeymoon for him now, or ever, not as long as he was in this ramshackle body. A soft green glow started at her fingertips, working its way down to her palms, then to her wrists. The glow resolved itself into flames, a spiral of pale green flame flickering in her palms.

“Holy shit,” Hancock breathed.

And even though he said it low, it was enough to break her concentration, to send the flames into the ceiling above them. She grimaced and held a palm to her forehead. “Oh fuck,” she whimpered. “Slinging magick used to make me feel high. Must be rustier than I thought.” 

“Not that rusty,” Nick murmured. “That’s some neat party trick you got there.”

She was blushing again. “It’s just...I mean I think most people could do it, if they ever figured it out. If they had enough rads in them maybe. Jeez, what I wouldn’t give for a Buffout right now.” 

Hancock went rummaging through his bag. “You’re in luck. I think I actually have that.” He handed the bottle out to her.

She grinned at him, the kind of grin that made his skin feel warm, the kind that made him think he might get lucky that day. “And how much do you want for it?”

He laughed. “Just take it before I change my mind. Free of charge.”

“I forgot to tell you in our little introductions that I’m traveling with a walking pharmacy,” Nick said. 

She dry-swallowed two tablets and handed the bottle back to Hancock. “You’re traveling with a godsend.”

Hancock cleared his throat. “We still haven’t decided on a plan. We gonna sit around here all day?“

“Maybe we can go back to the ship,” Lydia suggested. “See if we can’t break anyone else out of their cages.”

Not having the heart to tell her that everyone else was likely dead, and she likely would have been too if not for the partial ghoulification she’d undergone, Nick and Hancock prepared for the journey.


	7. Chapter 7

They expected that perhaps the area outside of their temporary shelter would be blasted by the flames that had ridden the hurricane force winds, a mess of blackened remnants. Instead it seemed to be not much worse for wear. As they stepped onto the mausoleum's porch they noticed that the gray scraggles of Spanish moss had all been burned away. Sinuous patterns of scorch marks and soot climbed the columns holding up the roof. Other than that, the land in front of them was as it had been for a century or more: a layer of water broken by dead buildings and fantastically twisted trees.

Lydia was the first to speak. "A lot better than I'd thought it would be."

None of them was particularly in a hurry. They slogged through the water at a steady pace, watching out for submerged threats. Nick stumped his toe on a mostly hidden tricycle and cursed as rust clouded up into the water in front of him, but otherwise their trip back was mostly uneventful. Lydia stopped here and there to toss something into her duffel bag; Nick mused that it looked like she was well suited for postapocalyptica. She reminded him of Nate in that way, so eager to collect scraps of the Old World. He wondered if she, too, would use them to build things with, or if she was just collecting for the hell of it. He began to notice a pattern to her collections; books, dip pens, the odd still-sealed package of candy. Things he'd consider to be luxury items, mainly. It was when she stopped them to head into an old art supply store on the edge of the Quarter that he finally got up the nerve to ask.

"Forgive an old man his curiosity doll, but, ah, what exactly are you picking all this up for?"

She glanced at him, one eyebrow up, the look on her face proclaiming that it should be obvious. "You ain't the one having to carry it, Detective Valentine. Why should it matter?"

He fiddled at the back of his neck with his good hand, an old mannerism from the human Nick when he was abashed. "I just wondered, is all."

She finally gave him a small smile. "You have your ways of surviving. I have mine. And I've always found I do that better with a good book and some drawing pencils."

Hancock leaned against the side of the building. "Go ahead. I've been waiting for a good opportunity to take a chem break, myself. You want some?"

She shook her head and slogged into the shade of the store. Hancock shrugged and popped a couple of Mentats into his mouth, rolling them slowly around his tongue, savoring the flavor. They were slightly chalky, but the fake grape flavor helped cover that up. Mostly. It was an acquired taste that he’d learned to love as his body had learned the way of the Mentat high. He watched Lydia pick through the rubble, finally holding up a tin of multicolored pencils with a satisfied expression.

When she came back out, Hancock swaggered up to her side. "So, you got a ride of choice? I'm a Mentats ghoul myself. Makes me feel...intellectual."

She didn’t answer. After a few steps, she had a question of her own. "So, you're a ghoul."

"Mm-hmm."

"What makes someone a ghoul?"

"Rads, mostly. There are some rumors about maybe different chemicals making it more likely. Nobody really knows why some people turn ghoul from rads and others just die. Or why some people just get to be more powerful." He gave her a soft poke in the side as he said this last.

"So, are there different kinds of ghouls? Or are they all like you?"

"Different. Some are withered up so bad they shouldn't even be able to move. Some of them are burnt up. The skin at their joints cracks open and bleeds when they move. Their skin is literally crispy, charred. Some of them glow. Some of them are drippy and gross and rotting. Me? I just got lucky. I got this whole king of the zombies thing going on. The ladies love it."

"I could see that." Hancock searched her face for any sign that she was making fun of him, replayed the tone of her voice in his head to search for sarcasm, but found none. She seemed mostly down to earth and conversational, like they were talking about the weather.

"So, with all the rads in my blood, am I a ghoul," she finally asked.

Hancock for once was silent. It was Nick who answered this time. "You're just you, doll. Not sure there's another one in the world."

"Sounds like you," she told Valentine.

Hancock felt a little flutter in his stomach. Jealousy? What right did he have for that? The woman didn't belong to anyone but herself. He doubted that had ever been different, doubted it ever would, even if she did get herself a boyfriend. She just seemed so...self possessed.

The next few miles gave Hancock even more to be jealous of. And he felt kind of stupid. By the time they crossed a block or so, Nick and Lydia were laughing over prewar TV shows, books, and movies. They were talking like two old friends about shit Hancock had never experienced, some shit he had never even heard of. Part of him was fascinated, soaking in as many details as he could.

Part of him felt like slinking away to be stupid by himself in silence. He knew--intellectually--that he had no reason to feel this way. That it was just a matter of being born later than those two. But he also kept remembering what his brother had told him over and over when they were kids, living in the upper stands of Diamond City with a mother whose soft heart was liable to get her killed sooner rather than later and a father who was gruffer than he wanted to be, trying to make his boys tough enough to survive. It had been his brother George who had tried to train him for life, older by six years and thinking he knew everything by the time John was old enough to talk. And George's favorite comment when John had been unwilling to take the shit he would have had to take to fit in with the sometimes clueless upper stands citizenry? "You're stupid, John. You could have it all from here, but you're too stupid to reach out and take it". His father's comments on the same basic problems? Also about John's stupidity, with a little bit of moaning about his smart-assery and his stubborness thrown in.

If refusing to settle for lapping up luxury while others starved was stupid, then put the dunce cap on him, he was certifiable. But it still stung when he didn't know what the hell was going on, like now. Still made him feel like that lost little boy who never quite knew what he was supposed to do--follow his heart, or follow convention?

The two behind him were so into their conversation, that Hancock was the first to notice the major shift when they got to the river. "Hey guys...you might want to make a new plan." He gestured toward the river. Where the ship had once loomed, now there was only empty waterfront.

Silence fell. Lydia cleared her throat after a while. "I guess I do owe you for getting me off of that old ship," she muttered.

And suddenly a new voice, heavily accented cajun, joined them. "Why did you leave that old ship, madame?”


	8. Chapter 8

The trio turned to see a quartet of ghouls, all of them packing serious heat. The youngest, leanest one had a .357 and vaguely in the back of his mind, Hancock kind of wanted the kid to take a shot at them, just so he could see if the kid could really handle the hand canon or if it would knock him on his ass. Nick's gun was up and pointed at the four in milliseconds, but although John pointed his weapon at them, he was having a hard time seeing them. They had positioned themselves with the sun at their backs, where it would blind Hancock and his friends. Clever. He cursed under his breath.

Lydia, for her part, remained calmer than anyone had any right to be. Her tone was as conversational as it had been with Nick. "These gentlemen assured me it was dangerous to stay. Considering that the thing's either floated out to sea or sunk, I guess they were correct."

"All due respect, ma'am, the only living things we've seen running around on that ship in the last two centuries were a bunch of cats with thumbs walking on two legs. And damned if they didn't mate with our normal cats and get the rest of 'em to doing it too."

Lydia smiled. "Any of them orange?"

"A lot of them."

"Chairman Meow, you always were a charmer," she muttered. Louder, to the quartet, she asked, "What can I help you with, gentlemen?"

"We would like for you to accompany us to our village." This came from the one John assumed to be the leader, judging by the fact that his voice seemed the oldest. As ghouls aged, most of them, their voices got rougher and rougher. This ghoul had the voice of a twenty-pack-a-day smoker.

"Sorry bucko. That's not in our plans for today," Nick said.

At the same moment, Lydia said, "Sure. Why not."

 

Hancock and Nick turned to stare at her. She pulled them to the side. "Look, we all know that ship was a research vessel. Chances are they want one of two things. Either they want help--which we might be able to give, and which will give us something to do. Or they're scared of us. In which case going with them and acting respectable will help ease their minds. Either way we avoid bloodshed."

"You don't know this world like we do, Doll," Nick muttered, his eyes roving between the quartet and Lydia's face. "Generally when someone holds a gun on you and tells you to come with them, they don't have very good plans for you."

"If they wanted us dead they never would have announced their presence. They would have just shot us in the back."

"Unless they like to play with their food," Hancock said.

Lydia laughed. "Let's see. Nick is made out of metal. I'm so full of rads they'd probably die after bite number two. And you're skinny as a rail and barely worth killing if what they're looking for is meat."

Hancock felt his face scrunch up. "Hey, I may be scrawny, but I bet I'm delicious!" He couldn't believe he actually felt insulted by the idea that the ghouls may not want to eat him.

"Say it a little louder," Lydia said close to his ear. Her breath feathered against his skin and he felt himself shiver. "Maybe they'll decide to try you out after all. With a little ketchup or barbecue sauce."

"Fine," Nick said, "Maybe they don't want to eat us. Maybe they want us for slave labor."

Lydia shrugged. "And they have a whole village. Four of them and three of us. Anybody in either group fires, and we're looking at the possibility of heavy casualties for both sides. Nobody fires but we refuse to go, they beat the shit out of us and take us to their village anyway. I say we start off with them, and if anything looks hinky we take them out on the road, by surprise. Wait for our moment."

Nick stared into her eyes. After a few moments, to Hancock's surprise, he nodded. "Okay. But I still think this is a bad idea."

"Hey, they're all bad ideas," Lydia said. "This just might happen to be the least bad of all of them. Besides, I have a good feeling about these folks. I can't explain it. I just...feel it. They don't want to hurt anyone they don't have to." She paused. “Except maybe the leader. I can’t quite get a read on him yet.”

Whatever drug she must be on to keep her so calm in the face of the unexpected, Hancock wanted some. There was no way she was this willing to just roll with the punches without some kind of chemical help.

_Unless she's crazy,_ he thought. That possibility seemed more likely the longer he thought about it.

"You better hope your good feeling isn't a load of crap," Hancock muttered. “For all our sakes.”

They followed the quartet of ghouls to an old aluminum boat with a couple of paddles and a motor. The three of them sat on one side; three of the ghouls sat on the other and the one who had introduced himself as Captain Nemo stood near the bow. Hancock disliked him almost immediately. He didn't like the way the ghoul posed on the bow, one hand held over his brow like he was keeping sun out of his eyes when in fact the sun was currently behind him. His posture was ramrod straight. He didn't like the way the Captain kept looking back at Lydia, his face unreadable. Hancock didn't know if he was just trying to figure her out or if he was in lust. He didn't like the Captain's way of calling his subordinates "boys" or his habit of barking orders at them without even bothering to look at them, like he was certain he would always be obeyed without question.

Maybe it was just Hancock's instant dislike of authority figures. Sometimes he didn't even like himself when he was playing mayor. He tried to keep his mind sharp while they motored along, sneaking Mentats here and there. He wanted to be able to find their way back if necessary. Wanted an idea of the kind of territory they were going into. The 'tats made his vision clearer, made all the bright colors contrast each other just a little more than usual. Made him make connections faster.

All of the wildlife had definitely come back, and Lydia was acting for all the world like a tour guide, telling Hancock and Nick about the places and animals they passed. Pelicans, herons, and egrets flew freely in flocks much bigger than Lydia remembered from before the war. Turtles bigger than the boat came to surface for air before ducking back under. Fish jumped, and they even passed a snake skimming along the water's surface, its head barely sticking up for air. She called it a copperhead and warned them to never let it get close enough to bite. She pointed out the remains of a building on rotted wooden posts and said it used to have the best seafood in the area. Told them the whole place had been host to lots of houses on posts before the war, houses high up with rickety wooden stairs and boats tied up underneath them. Nick silently willed Hancock to keep his camera hidden in case it made their escorts nervous or angry, but of course he pulled it out and started snapping shots as soon as the boat started up. 

"Bunch of cajuns used to live out here. Did a lot of fishing and trapping for a living. Even before the war these folks were used to eating anything that didn't eat them first. Have a hard time believing at least some of them wouldn't survive."

"We did," the Captain said, and smirked at her. He seemed amused. "I would have pegged you as a city girl."

Lydia smiled back at him, her posture suddenly straight, her accent almost completely subsumed as she enunciated her words as properly as any finishing school graduate. "I am perfectly capable of acting like a fine upstanding city lady." Suddenly she dropped back into her usual relaxed, lounging posture, and her accent was back, thick as ever. "Or I can hang out with the good ol' boys and girls down on the bayou. Go to a place enough times, and it's liable to get into your blood."

"Very true," the Captain said. "Did you grow up out here?"

"No. But a lot of times I wished I had. Seemed like a lot more fun out here swimming and fishing than sitting in some stuffy..." she stopped herself mid sentence, cutting the conversation off just like that. "I wished I had." She left it at that.

Captain Nemo had the good graces to turn back to face forward again, letting the conversation die. Hancock started to like him just a little more.

But only a little.

********  
They were maybe an hour out of the city when they entered a densely wooded area of swamp and Captain Nemo gave the order to cut the motor. Tall misshapen trees laden with moss hemmed them in from every direction, and there were more of those curious roots that Lydia called cypress knees. She claimed the wood was excellent for building in the swamp, that it resisted humidity and mildew better than any other wood around. Lightning bugs zipped around them, miraculously no larger now than they'd been pre-war, and frogs croaked and sang from every floating log. Just when Hancock thought the place couldn't get any more magical, he caught the soft strains of violin floating towards them. Some waltz, it sounded like. "Oh Madame Sosthene, mais donnez mois Alida..."

To his surprise, Lydia started humming along.

Through the trees and foliage he began to make out the village the captain had mentioned. It was a conglomeration of wooden shacks built on more of the stilts the locals here favored, with wooden walkways between. Innumerable boats and canoes dotted the water beneath the houses, including some that looked to be hollowed out from a single log. Lydia called these "pee-rows", whatever that was. Colorful fishing nets that appeared to have been made from the scraps of whatever cloth the settlers had found laying about fluttered from various walkways and railings. In the southwestern corner, row upon row of clotheslines hung with what appeared to be the garments of the whole village as a team of washers--all women--worked to hang out yet more. In the southeastern corner, a metal barge held at least half a dozen cookstations and wood stoves, with yet another team stirring humongous kettles. On a balcony above them a troupe of children bent over their lessons. The music turned out to be coming from a phonograph that had to have been at least a century old even before the war, an elderly man in a wheelchair sitting beside it with a crate of records. A deep seated feeling of peace emanated from the settlement.

Hancock still didn't trust it. He remembered exploring Covenant with Nate, one of those times that Nick had been on another case from Diamond City. Remembered how clean and freshly-renovated everything looked. And he remembered what had happened after. He could only hope this small settlement really was the haven it appeared to be on the surface.

"Welcome to Belle Chanson," Captain Nemo told them.

"Pretty song," Lydia said. "How'd y'all ever get a name like that?"

"Nice way to segue, sister," Hancock said, still confused about how she'd switched so quickly from admiring the music to asking about the town's name.

"That's what it means in French," she told him. "Belle Chanson means pretty song.”

"It was maybe two or three decades after the war ended. On the day the bombs dropped, a lot of us had already evac'd out to Lafayette. Supposed to be a late storm come through, something about a category four, maybe five. It was late in the season for hurricanes, so some of the fools thought the weather man was wrong. But some of us heeded the warnings. The ones who didn't were either rich enough to be cocky that their reinforced mansions and steel storm shutters would keep them safe, or they were poor enough that they didn't have nowhere to go. Me, I had some family up in Lafayette. Figured it'd be far enough away to let the storm have some time to settle. Hell, at least it wasn't built in a bowl like New Orleans, or already on the water like my stilt house. My grandad, he remembered a bad storm that had come through before. I don't remember what they called that one. Something that sounded vaguely Russian. Katarina? His family stayed. But he raised my daddy and me, always run from something bigger than you, and Mother Nature will always be bigger than you.

Anyway, we evac'd like the government told us to. Knew that they meant it when they said they would try to help those who stayed if they got stuck, but they didn't have a lot of manpower to go around to do so. Me, I was kept out of the military by my bum leg. You may have noticed one is shorter than the other and I walk with a limp. Fell off the porch when I was four or five and my leg hit the boat motor on my way down. I tried to tell 'em I could walk real well on it, I had it almost all my life, but that's how it was. But lots of folks were off at war. Seems like the military and police forces here at home were running skeleton crews." 

Nick nodded at this point. "They were. I remember our solved case list went way down during the war. My higher ups started to do what they called triage. Decided what cases were important enough to spend our low manpower on and what cases could just...disappear if they had to. Mostly the ones that were deemed worth trying for were the ones involving the people you mentioned earlier. The well connected."

Lydia looked grim, but she nodded too. "One of the best kept secrets of the war. Here on the home front, everything looked like peaches and cream on the surface, but underneath....ohhhhh boy, underneath." 

Hancock was starting to become glad he had been born well after all this. The 'Wealth was brutal, but at least it was honest about it. You knew where you stood almost instantly; if it didn't shoot at you or try to eat you, you could generally ignore it. Listening to the rest of them, it certainly didn't sound like prewar was the mechanized heaven wastelanders tended to imagine with a false nostalgia born of never having been there. 

"Anyway," Captain Nemo continued, "We were in Lafayette when the bombs hit, me, my mom, my sister, and my cousin Jean Claude. We didn't have no vaults in Lafayette. Same problem as New Orleans--water table a little too high to make it really that feasible. At least not without a hell of a lot of pumps running all the time. Heard there might have been one up around Monroe, and another one they had planned for Alexandria, but us down south? Nah. Some folks had some bomb shelters built above ground though. Concrete and rebar in the bottom floors of courthouses and stuff. We didn't really have time to even think about it. Wasn't no siren." Captain Nemo laughed. "All that time we had been playing games and watching cartoons about the bomb and having drills at the schoolhouse about duck and cover, about curling up under your desk with your hands over your head and trying not to look into the flash, but in the real world there wasn't any warning. There was just this bright light in the sky from off in the distance, and a strong wind, and it felt like the ground under your feet had all of a sudden turned to ocean waves. Not that you were on your feet for long once that flash hit. Not long at all. I was out on the porch at the time cleaning fish with Jean Claude while Mama was shelling butterbeans. Then there was that flash, and then for a while just...nothing. I woke up with that tin roof over the top of me and this glowing dust everywhere. Mama was killed when the porch fell on us. Jean Claude hadn't been under the roof at the time, and he's the one what dug me out from under there. His skin was....one big blister. Over the next few days we puked our guts out. Hair started falling out. Nosebleeds, bad ones, I'm talking enough to fill a Nuka bottle and then some. Skin falling off. Jean Claude died in two days. Me? I just kept going.

A couple of decades later I decided I wanted to see if anything was left down here. Between the storm and the bombs I figured there wouldn't be, and we never had any traders talk about coming down here, but hell, I wanted to see for myself. Maybe there was a lot of moonshine that went into that decision. That was before I cleaned up. When I got out this way in my boat, I heard the same kind of thing you guys just did--old timey Cajun music drifting out over the water. Back then there wasn't but one cabin out here, an old woman and her daughter just living off the land and the swamp like people did for generations before them. They had never even tried for New Orleans. Had been born and raised out here. The daddy had gone off to war, and the old woman and her daughter just kept going after all the shit went down. Said for all they knew they might be the last two people in the world, but damned if they were gonna take themselves out of it before the good lord saw fit to do it hisself. I named the place after the music I heard when I was wandering around out here. Went out and found more stragglers off by themselves out there. Figured the rads didn't hurt me, maybe being...this...would make me tougher in other ways too. Made me tough enough to bring folks back and start a real community here."

The group was silent after that. Their boat passed underneath the town and came to a dock on the other side. Another metal barge, the deck of this one covered in soil, slouched in the water, overflowing with greenery. They pulled up to a large dock with several boats floating at it, each tethered by a rope loosely looped over a post. Each post had a small wood plaque with a name burned into it nailed to the top. The one they tied off at simply read "Security".


	9. Chapter 9

Captain Nemo led them up a flight of surprisingly smooth sanded wooden stairs to a large wooden shack. The walls were lined with benches. In the middle an old cast iron stove stood cold and empty, not needed in the current mild weather. Cushions with multicolored crocheted covers and tendrils of spanish moss peeking out of their seams lined every bench. The room was very homey. 

At least, it would have been, under other circumstances. The settlers--mostly barefoot on the warm, well worn wooden planks--kept staring at them. Several gave Lydia one of those toe-to-head-to-toe glances favored by prewar society dames trying to make a person feel unwelcome without being rude enough to come out and say it. No one batted an eyelash at Hancock--they were familiar with ghouls, and if they found his dress eccentric they seemed to shrug it off and go about their business. A few of them glanced at Nick with outright curiosity, and a little boy shyly touched his metal hand and grinned at him before running over to tell his mom something in rapid fire French. The lad's curiosity seemed friendly enough, though, and both the boy and the mother looked at him with a smile. 

The few who did give Nick suspicious side-eye glances didn't bother him. He was so used to the rampant paranoia about synths back in Boston--and the rampant paranoia about any stranger in many of the other places they'd visited--that he would have been more worried if there hadn't been at least one or two of them side-eyeing him. 

But he wasn't entirely sure what their problem with Lydia might be. They surely didn't know yet that she was from the ship; he hadn't seen Captain radio anyone about their arrival. Other than being a little pale from her long incarceration in the tank, and a glow to her eyes that was almost unnoticeable in the daylight, she looked human enough. Certainly more human than he or Hancock. He wondered if it was the way she was dressed; it certainly would have been a scandal anywhere but a whorehouse before the war. Maybe these people hadn't ever passed that particular prejudice up. In the 'Wealth it didn't seem to matter what anyone wore; even being naked--as Nate had been that one memorable time he'd tried Psycho and subsequently run in circles around Diamond City in the nude jumping from rooftops--wasn't all that big a deal. More unappreciated the uglier you were, but overall people just shrugged and figured that was part of life. People went a little crazy from time to time. But this isolated community was an unknown quantity to Nick, and he silently prayed that he and his companions didn’t unknowingly break any big rules.

Captain Nemo left them in the homey room, instructing them to have a seat. The youngster stood at the door with his hand-canon, not exactly pointing it at them and not officially on guard but obviously there to deter any bad ideas the trio might get into their heads. Lydia and Hancock, both tactile and restless, wandered the room touching every damn thing, examining the pillows and the woodwork. Nick listened with some amusement as Lydia explained to Hancock what a granny square was, what crocheting was, and how to make yarn out of an old tee-shirt, all things she had apparently known even before the bombs had made recycling and crafting more of a necessity than a hobby. Hancock, of course, was taking pictures again. Snap. Shake. Toss in his plastic bag. Repeat.

Nick wondered if he was traveling with the two weirdest people in the wasteland. 

It wasn’t much longer before a group of people filed in. The old man who had been playing the phonograph, his white hair thin and wispy around his face. He called himself Arnie. An old black woman with the eyes of a twenty year old and the face of a mummy, who introduced herself as Mother Abigail. Captain Nemo, of course, And an old woman with the brightest pink scarf Nick had ever seen, named Tante Jolie. They sat in silence for a few minutes before Mother Abigail, the spokesperson of the group, started in a mellow voice as smooth as butter.

“I need you to know why we brought you here,” she said. “That ship this young lady was on was a research vessel from long ago. Captain Nemo here assures me that Westek was involved in some dangerous business. The council decided to keep watch on it in case anything...unusual...happened. We’ve been watching that ship for almost 200 years now. And finally, something unusual happened.”

Lydia spoke for the trio, keeping her eyes on Mother Abigail’s kind, careworn face. “I know you have probably figured out that Westek was into warfare. There was talk around the ship that they used a ship precisely so they could go into international waters, blur the law a little. So I know their reputation is...a little bad.”

“Some of the scientists at one of their land facilities were executed by the military,” Captain Nemo said. “For atrocities. Experimenting on prisoners, that kind of thing.”

Lydia took a deep breath. “I can assure you, I was there by my own free will, and I wasn't a prisoner. And it is true I was an experiment. But as you can see, I’m still quite in control of myself.”

“Maybe that just makes you more dangerous.” Captain Nemo sat close to her, staring into her eyes. Yes, Hancock decided, he didn’t like this man at all. “Maybe that just means you’re able to plan your mischief.”

Mother Abigal cleared her throat. “Nemo…”

“No,” Lydia broke in. “The man is correct. Someone who can reason can be more dangerous than a beast or a lunatic. Case in point, the politicians and generals who dropped the bombs.” 

Nemo leaned back a little, then gave her a slow smile. “Not a fan of the government?”

“Why, just because Westek was under contract with them? We both know it’s just a bit late to convict anyone of treason or lock anyone up for speaking sedition. No, I’m not a fan of the old government. They spent entirely too much of their time looking under the bed for commies when they could have been figuring out how to make peace with them and use their research to help the entire species. They used the poor and the brainwashed for canon fodder and made sure that women and blacks and foreigners were kept strictly in their place under the rulers’ feet. Why would I be a fan of that? Why would anybody who didn’t happen to be on top?”

Hancock applauded. All eyes turned to look at him, and if he were anyone else in the world he probably would have felt embarrassed, but being who he was he just smiled at them. “What? The lady seems to have a point.” Lydia nodded at him, smiling warmly, and that same something fluttered inside him again. 

“So here we have, what,” Nemo asked. “A robot, a pirate, and an experiment?”

Hancock growled, but Nemo kept going.

“What, exactly, was the nature of your role? How did you get to still be alive two centuries later, without a single missing nose or bald spot like the rest of us ghouls?”

Lydia gave him the short version about the RadAway and the radium, about increasing her potential as a soldier, but kept the witch part to herself. She didn’t want to have to pull off a repeat demonstration in front of these people. And she had seen the looks she had gotten from some of the settlers, that familiar mix of disgust and anger she’d gotten when she was walking the dark alleys of the Quarter, fucking for cash. She remembered how before the war, witches were considered a myth, a misconception that real witches tried very hard to keep up for the sake of avoiding a return to the times of hangings and witch trials and burnings. She hoped Hancock would keep it to himself. Nick, she was sure, remembered prewar in much the same way, as a land invested in conformity and infested with paranoiacs. 

“To be honest,” Lydia finished, “I’m not entirely sure what they thought the treatments would really accomplish. Only that I got them.” It was sort of true. She knew in theory that it was supposed to make her better able to sling energy, but she had never, she was sure, been given the full briefing on everything the scientists hoped it would do. People like them never gave you the full story.

Nemo stared at her in silence, his forehead--what was left of it--scrunched in thought. Or maybe chagrin. “So you don’t have any sort of mission, then?”

“Now? No. I’m...lost. I was never supposed to live this long.”

Something inside Hancock disagreed with that, but he kept his lips sealed. He didn’t trust Nemo. Something in the man’s posture, in his face, looked perpetually disgusted, furious, and antsy. Hancock almost got the feeling that the man was minutes away from going feral at any given time. He figured he didn’t need to give the man any ammunition. 

Mother Abigail was once again the one to break the silence. “Well, you can always stay here at Belle Chanson,” she said. “Become part of the community. I’m sure we could find some talents of yours to put to use.” 

Nick watched Lydia closely at that. A person’s reaction to being invited to live somewhere could be a big tell about what kind of person they were. And Lydia, for a split second, looked panicked, before the facade of calm slid back over her face.

“That’s awfully kind of you Mother Abigail, but I was planning on maybe having a look around. Seeing what the world looks like these days. It’s already been...quite an experience.”

“Something wrong with this place,” Nemo asked before Mother Abigail shushed him again.

“No. It’s just...look, even before the war I was never the stay in one place kind of girl. I don’t...fit in anywhere. It’s nice of you to offer but you don’t even know us, and…”

“The offer wasn’t extended to an ‘us’,” Nemo said. “We would have to talk to your friends here a little more before we could decide if we wanted them here as well.”

That’s when Hancock really started having flashbacks to Covenant.  
********  
The next hour or so passed in a blur, with the elders asking questions and Nick, Hancock, and Lydia trying to be as discreet as possible while appearing as open as possible. None of them mentioned Boston as Nick or Hancock’s original home, simply stating “up north” and leaving it at that. None of them mentioned Nick’s prewar job, or Hancock’s mayoral duties. By the end of the interview, if that’s what it was, it was clear that both sides were suspicious. Lydia argued for their leaving, several times, offering at first to let them blindfold the trio and lead them away (not Hancock’s favorite idea, and an idea that Nick sputtered at, but none of the elders was inclined to go for that anyway). She offered to go out on supply runs for the group, thinking no doubt that if they sent them out with only one or two guards it would be easy enough to get away. After that one, Captain Nemo growled out “no idea you have is going to get you three out of this settlement” and she had sat back, face as immobile as if set in stone.

By the end of it all, Mother Abigail had muttered “why don’t you stay with us for just a little while”. It was clear that Captain Nemo was a very big deal in the settlement, maybe just by virtue of being the oldest. It was also clear that the rest of them, either out of fear, loyalty, or misguided trust, would follow him.

Lydia disappeared after they were dismissed. Hancock and Nick found themselves sitting on the dock where Nemo’s boat had been tied, being watched by Kieran, who kept one hand on his gun at all times as if to remind them that he had it. Hancock felt caged, and Nick was smoking even more than usual. Hancock refused a cigarette when Nick offered one. He didn’t know how long they might be here or how many Nick might have, and anyway, he was only a ‘social smoker’ at best. Chems and liquor were more his bag.

“Why do you think they’re so dead set on keeping us here,” Hancock asked. 

“I don’t know that they are. Nemo is. The rest of the elders seemed understanding, if a little disappointed, and a lot of the settlers up there working seem to want to get rid of us, if the looks on their faces are any indication.”

“You caught that too.”

Nick nodded. “Maybe Nemo is still thinking of Lydia as some sort of weapon. Maybe he just wants her here for the same reason any man would, and he happens to have the power to make it happen. Either way, he’s our primary problem.”

Hancock smiled at that. So, Nick did have some notions of sexual attraction left in his processor after all. He always tried to act so calm, so in control, that Hancock had wondered. He had figured Nick had more bad habits and humanity left over than just his love of cigarettes and power noodles. “Pretty big problem. Ghouls are practically immortal.”

Nick scoffed. “You live longer than a regular human. No one said you were immortal. If I shot you in the face, you’d keel over dead as a door nail in no time.”

Hancock punched him on the arm, but lightly. “Hey, I thought we were friends, and here you are planning my demise.”

“We are friends, John. That’s why it’s up to me to remind you about the facts of life when you get cocky and say things like you’re immortal.”

Nick gave him one of his rare smiles, and Hancock’s skin warmed all over. He had noticed that the synth didn’t smile much, even when exchanging pleasantries with settlers in Diamond City, but Hancock could get him to crack a smile at least daily. Nick may never want him, may not be wired to want anyone, but Hancock sure did love to see that smile. The synth had had a hard life, and if anyone could understand that it was Hancock. He would do anything to give Nick what enjoyment he could. 

It was at that moment that they finally found Lydia. A pale face bobbed in the water in front of them, hair loose and streaming around her like a mermaid, and if she wasn’t a chem hallucination she was naked as the day she was born. 

Nick remained deadpan. “If this is your great escape plan, Doll, you may want to rethink it. Swimming nude all the way back to New Orleans doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.”

Hancock found himself reaching for one of Nick’s cigarettes and settled for his flask of bourbon instead. “How much do you want to bet the entire settlement’s been using that as a bathroom?”

Lydia scoffed. “Have you been to their communal toilets, fellas? Because I have.” She pointed up to the underside of one of the highest shacks. Metal pipes led down in a tangle to a large diameter pipe. The large one angled off toward the shore, where it disappeared into a concrete wall. “These folks know better than to shit in the same water they use for cooking and bathing and drinking. I didn’t see so much as a single drop of leakage from the pipe seams, either.”

Hancock stared at her. Nick gave her one of his grins, and Hancock would have felt jealous, if he didn’t find himself liking her so much. Swimming naked in broad daylight? His kind of girl. 

Not that he would be joining her. 

“So, you did your homework,” he said, his voice gruffer than he intended. “Did you happen to think about the local wildlife that might be in there?”

She blew a raspberry at him. “I’d bet I know more about the prewar local wildlife than you do,” she said, playfully. “Besides, Nick told me about the alligators. They were the biggest concern, next to the snakes, and the snakes generally avoid humans. It was the alligators who saw us as prey animals. I’ve been in here for a while now without so much as a single nibble. You ought to join me.” 

“It seems I forgot my trunks,” Nick said. “Forgive me if I’m not as comfortable showing off my assets as you.”

“And you, Mayor? Your constituents are too far away to see your...indiscretion. Why don’t you join me?”

“I’m not a fan of water. You do you, though.” 

She snorted at them and swam up to the dock, lightly grasping at one of the posts holding it up. Hancock had a moment of hope that she was coming out of there, that she would just waltz on up to the dock naked as a jaybird, but she didn’t. She rested her arms on one of the pillars holding the dock up and looked up at them. The view of her breasts, creamy pale and full and floating toward the surface, was spectacular. He almost felt guilty for looking. Almost. 

Nick pointedly looked away, into the bushes at the shore. “Would you mind keeping watch for a minute? I’ve got to run a diagnostic.” 

Hancock cocked an eyebrow--or the scarred skin where he’d used to have one--but said nothing. He wondered if “run a diagnostic” was some kind of code for “have a hot sexy fun times fantasy”. He doubted it, but wouldn’t it be fun if that was the case. If it were, Hancock would make it a personal challenge to make Nick run diagnostics as often as robotically possible. He stifled a chuckle. 

Lydia looked up at Hancock. “He do that often?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes. I don’t really know what he’s doing, to be honest. I just know when he does it, he needs somebody to watch his back. It’s like a mini nap or something.”

She nodded. “So, you’re the walking pharmacy, correct?”

This time he did chuckle. “Yeah. Why, you need a prescription?”

“Maybe. You have any zephyr?”

He let out a low whistle. “I think you just threw a chem at me that I’ve never heard of. Do you know how big of a feat that is? What is that, anyway?”

“Kind of like calmex, or medex, but lasts a lot longer. Gives you a long, slow calm. Lasts up to 24 hours. They used to use it off-label for post traumatic stress disorder.”

He smiled. “I can’t say as I’ve had anything like that. Sounds like something they could use a lot of back in the Commonwealth, though.” He couldn’t help but notice she was frowning. “Why? You need some?”

“Maybe. You have any medex? Calmex?”

“Sister, right now I have jet, psycho, stimpacks, rad-x, Radaway, jet fuel, day tripper, and mentats. That usually meets all of my needs. I’m afraid coming down has never been my trip of choice.”

“It’s ok,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.” Before he could say anything else, she ducked under the water, surfacing ten feet away and headed farther. 

Nick’s eyes cleared and he watched her swim away. “What’d I miss?”

“Chem talk. Nothing too important.” Hancock would kick himself for that assumption later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Mother Abigail is inspired by Stephen King.


	10. Chapter 10

Lydia wondered what the hell she was going to do now. She had talked the science team into continuing her doses of zephyr while she was in the tank, using their fear of her going homicidal to convince them. She had brought a syringe of it to the lab with her, hidden in her clothes to inject as soon as she was let out of the tank. But she had been counting on getting back to one of her various stash points to get the ingredients to make more, as she hadn’t been sure how long the doses would stay good in the duffle bag in her tomb. Prewar it had gotten awfully hot in the city. She knew how zephyr could be made on the street--before she had gone rogue as a prostitute, her second pimp, Sawyer, had his girls cooking chems as a side business--but she didn’t have any of the ingredients with her. She had grown her own patches of Valerian root on various rooftops in the city back before the war, but she had no way of knowing if they were still there or any way of getting to the city to obtain them if they were. It was the main ingredient in the street version of zephyr, along with a little bit of stimpak and rum, all easy enough to get before the war. Now? She had no idea. 

She had simply assumed that Hancock would have had some, being a “walking pharmacy” as his partner had described him. Zephyr had been wildly popular prewar in New Orleans, a great companion to the caffeinated Storm Rider drinks they’d sold in every bar and restaurant in the Quarter. She had spent many a night happily hopped up on Storm Riders and zephyr, the drink giving her energy and the chem keeping her high mellow. With the occasional exception for a party, she hadn’t really been much of a chem user. But zephyr had been a pharmaceutical drug, not just a street chem, and her original doses had come from a prescription from her doctor, who had recommended she take one injection daily. It had worked wonders from the first dose. With the zephyr, she could sleep deeply, without flashbacks or nightmares. With it, she could walk the streets of the Quarter without waiting to be jumped from every dark alley. Her heart rate was normal for the first time in years, and the nausea that had plagued her from early childhood on was gone. 

It hadn’t taken long to see the other side of the chem when her prescription had run dry. She had originally intended to pick more up after helping one of her friends, a fellow working girl nicknamed Cherry, get to Las Vegas to see if she could get away from her own pimp and go rogue like Lydia had. In the desert, no contacts and no prescription, she had quickly learned that all the symptoms that the zephyr helped to prevent came back double strength when she didn’t have the chem. She had actually hallucinated, and the flight home had been a long hell of talking to her shadows and trying not to lash out at everyone who came near. 

Fortunately she had remembered from her time with Sawyer how to make it herself. 

There was no way she wanted to go through that again. She had just met Hancock and Nick, and thought they might make fine travelling companions as long as they’d have her around, but if she started hallucinating or having panic attacks again without her meds chances were good that they’d drop her like a hot potato. 

She made it back to her clothes, piled on a small dock underneath the school platform, and redressed herself with tremoring hands. As soon as she ascended the steps, she locked eyes with Captain Nemo. She could swear he was smirking.

Instead of engaging with him she turned around and sat at one of the small tables near the railing. Mother Abigail sat there as well, slowly knitting with a look of concentration on her face. Mother Abigail glanced up at her. “Something I can help you with, child?”

“Ma’am, I have to ask. Why do you think the Captain is so intent on keeping us here?”

“I do not know for sure. He does not share his thoughts with us as much as you might think. I suspect he simply wants to watch you, to wait and see what your time on that ship did to you.” 

Lydia stared at the worn, scarred tabletop in front of her and sighed. “You would think I was crazy if I told you.”

Mother Abigail put one hand on her arm and gave her a gentle smile. Her thumb gently traced the tattooed scrollwork on Lydia’s left wrist. “I might believe more than you think, Lydia.” 

Lydia found herself looking into the woman’s eyes. She took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of people being able to do things that...may be...a little unusual?”

The elder laughed. “Doesn’t every person have at least one unusual something about them, be it something they do or something they just are?”

Lydia found the old woman’s voice soothing. “Well, I’m thinking more like, people being able to do things that they shouldn’t be able to do. Things science would say are not possible.” 

Mother Abigail’s eyes twinkled. “You mean like being able to tell when and where a plant would grow best just by talking to the seeds? Or being able to talk to animals with your mind? Knowing the inner workings of machines without any schooling? Those kinds of things?”

Lydia gaped at her. “You know people who can do these things?”

“I am one. We call them little talents. Little things that help us survive.”

“There are more of you?!”

“At least two or three seem to show up in every generation. Nemo swears that before the war it wasn’t something he had ever seen, swears it used to be science fiction. Then again, so did ghouls.”

Lydia let out another sigh and let herself slump back in her chair. “And here I thought you guys would either think I was crazy or think you had to burn me at the stake.”

Mother Abigail seemed shocked. “We don’t burn people for having talents. Talents are meant to be used for the community’s good. Meant to be used to help us all live better, together. Why, what’s your talent sweetheart?”

Lydia began to explain.  
**************  
Hancock’s stomach growled at the smells wafting over from the cooking platform. Nick stood and held a hand out to him. “Come on, John. You can’t live on chems alone.”

“Watch me,” he grumbled, but let Nick help him up and started his swaying walk toward the platform. 

The two stopped when they noticed Lydia sitting at the railing of the school platform with a small audience around her, talking intently with Mother Abigail and several of the other elders they had been interviewed by before. Hancock started toward them, his fingers going toward his shotgun, but Nick stopped him. 

“Look again,” Nick muttered. “No one seems angry. Lydia’s not tensed up. Talks are going well. Maybe she’s arranging our release.” 

Hancock let his shotgun stay in its sheath, somewhat reluctantly. His fingers had been itching to caress that trigger since they had been told that they would be staying, no matter their thoughts on the matter. Hancock had never reacted well to authority, much less entrapment. A part of him longed to go feral, to sink his teeth into someone’s throat and grin bloody teethed at them until they begged him to leave.

Of course, it was more likely they’d just kill him. He supposed Nick, his voice of reason, was right.

It didn’t make him any happier about it though.

They watched as Lydia closed her eyes and began her soft, singsong chanting in French again, watched as the ethereal green flames grew in her palms. Watched as Mother Abigail used those flames to turn a knife blade red hot, and to light a candle. Lydia let the flames die down, and Mother Abigail examined her unmarked skin, smiling.

Several of the people who had been glaring at her--and her state of dress--earlier were now crowded around the table, talking excitedly and showing her their own talents. A red haired woman and her young daughter stood at the railing and pointed at the water, which they caused to coil upwards to the railing and turned into various shapes. A brunette man of slight stature pointed at the inner workings of a laser pistol, rapid firing explanations that Hancock only caught half of. Mostly what he understood was that the man was able to make weapons do unusual things, and somehow he just...knew how. Another woman explained that she knew how to find lost things, like Lydia’s prewar friend, and another man showed off the gills that allowed him to breathe underwater when he went fishing. 

Hancock and Nick glanced at each other. “Holy shit,” Hancock breathed. “I think we ended up in a whole colony of witches. This is my kind of freakshow!” With a grin, he was off to the table, eager to hear more. 

Nick couldn’t help but notice that Nemo was standing over by the cooking pots, frowning at the scene.   
*****************  
Nemo couldn’t believe his eyes at first, when the woman started growing spirals of flame from her palms. She had claimed to be prewar, claimed that the program had selected her to test out how to improve soldiers’ longevity through radiation treatments. He had thought that couldn’t possibly be true, even with her explanation of the radium-radaway-radium-radaway cycle they’d imposed upon her through her time in “the tank”. Her skin was as unmarked as any prewar pinup model’s, though unusually pale. Her pallor supported the idea of being in a tank, and through the years the guards had never seen her--or anyone else, until the synth and the ghoul--enter the ship, so he supposed it was possible that she was prewar all right. He had heard of similar experiments in other places. Not long ago, when Nemo and his trading crew went up to Lafayette to meet a caravan to swap supplies, there had been rumors that someone else had escaped a vault near Boston, two centuries after being sealed in--and frozen in some cryogenics experiment. So there was precedent for prewar people who looked as unmarked as her.

But the thing of it was, he couldn’t believe it was radiation that had done it. Radiation was what had given him his longevity, true enough. But he had paid a hefty price for it. What was left of his skin was withered over the muscle, and at least once a week some piece of skin sluiced off here or there, leaving gaping painful wounds. His joints ached something fierce most days, even with regular baths in the irradiated waters of the flooded city of New Orleans. This woman seemed to be getting around with remarkable speed and grace, which belied the idea that she was in any pain. He remembered his change as excruciating, and judging by the state of her companion’s skin and lack of nose, he imagined John Hancock would have said the same. Radiation killed, or it maimed. Any gifts it gave, he had decided long ago, came with serious caveats. 

And yet. There she sat. Maybe it was because she was a “witch” as he’d heard her describe herself. Or talented, as Mother Abigail described them. Maybe it affected them differently than it did most people, and wasn’t that just a gas? He stared at the little gathering, watching the show offs tell each other what they could do, acting like it was something to be proud of. This just proved to him that he was right to have insisted that she stay in the settlement where he could keep an eye on her. Those clothes marked her, and that tattoo, as much as any talent she showed off. She was no proper housewife or nanny. She was what his father would have called “a fine ride, but best kept in the city”. It had been a woman like her that had taken his virginity when he was fourteen, with his father and older brother waiting in the parlor outside for him to tell them he had successfully become a man. And it was a woman like her--a witch--that his father, a Bible-toting God-fearing Christian, would have called the Devil’s bride. 

He had grit his teeth at each new witch revealed in their settlement, but he had said nothing. So far their talents kept the settlement safe and supplied, and so he supposed that perhaps this postwar version of talents was God’s way of helping his people make it through the ruins of their sin. Though he wasn’t entirely sure the bombs themselves weren’t God’s own will. Hadn’t his preacher yelled at them often enough that the world would end by fire? And so it had. But this woman, this witch, who had been what she was even before the bombs...she put lie to that notion he’d had. That idea that this was something that had come up only after the bombs. He had heard her tell Mother Abigail that this was something she’d always had, something that Westek had been hoping to make stronger, and if that didn’t indicate that her abilities were something to be feared and maybe even ended, what did? He had heard about Westek’s experiments, read about them in a news magazine while his mother drove them to Lafayette to evacuate from the coming hurricane that had been predicted. Trying to create super soldiers, mutating them with some virus, basically spitting in the face of their creator and trying to usurp his powers for their own. Of course they would ally themselves with witches and whores. It was only natural. 

And he’d bet his bottom dollar she had been a whore. No respectable woman had tattoos that visible. No respectable woman had skirts that short, and they certainly didn’t let their hair run wild and long. Respectable women would have had to have a husband’s or father’s permission to enter such a program as Westek ran, too, probably in writing--in his time, a woman needed her husband’s signature to get birth control, or most jobs. Yet this one didn’t mention anything about a husband or a father, and she wore no ring. And she was entirely too cocky for his liking. 

He caught her companions--the robot and the ghoul--watching him. He stared back, waiting for one of them to drop their gaze first. He was beginning to get the feeling hell would freeze over first when Kieran, one of his guards, cleared his throat behind him. 

“What,” he snapped, a bit more peevishly than he’d intended.

“Sir, it’s just that, with the ship gone, the guards were wondering, what we’re supposed to be doing.” 

Nemo was silent for a few moments. Now that the ship was gone, there was no sense keeping an eye on the city--it was so irradiated only ghouls would dare enter it, and the supplies there had bathed in so much radiation that even they didn’t dare bring them back to the humans. He knew that metal tended to soak up radiation and carry it, but he suspected other stuff probably did too. “Watch our guests,” he said finally.

“How long are they staying, sir?”

“Until I say otherwise.”  
***********  
The day seemed longer than any she’d had before the war, but it did finally come to an end. Lydia sat on one of the decks, watching fireflies glimmer in the bushes on the shore. She had pulled one of her pilfered art pads and the colored pencils out of her bag and sat by a lantern, drawing her first impression of the settlement from memory. Hancock made more noise than was strictly necessary as he and Nick came up behind her and had a seat with her. He glanced over at the paper and let out a low whistle. It was almost photorealistic, detailed and finely shaded. At first he thought she had put more colors than there really were in life in her drawing--slight purplish tinges to the shadows, a little gold and orange in the wood of the settlement’s buildings--but as he thought back on it, he thought maybe those colors had been there. It beat the hell out of a black and white Prosnap. 

“Now where did you learn to do something like that,” he rasped.

“Practice.” Her voice was nonchalant. “When I was a kid, all I really did was read and draw.”

“Didn’t you have any friends tempting you outside?” Hancock thought back to his own childhood, but he couldn’t remember anyone tempting him out. Then he grinned. That was because he had been the one doing the tempting, of course. He remembered encouraging his older brother to sneak out of Diamond City with him, just to see what was on the other side of the wall. Of course kiss-up George had told their dad, who immediately smacked John upside the head and put him on lockdown for a week, but that hadn’t stopped him from engaging in similar adventures. He just learned from then on to be more choosy about who he took with him. He had been all of seven years old at the time. No wonder that when he had gotten into chems, at about twelve or thirteen, he had known exactly how to get to Goodneighbor and stay hidden the whole way. Hell, he didn’t remember doing much sleeping when he was a kid; he generally spent most of his nights sneaking around and his days at the schoolhouse. 

She glanced up at him, and he thought he saw something cross her face before she composed herself and stared down at her drawing again. He couldn’t name what that something was. “No. I was….my father was a business man and my mother was very respectable. I was to be seen and not heard. I was to be presentable and prim like some delicate fucking doll.”

Oh. Bitterness. That’s what that look had been, Hancock decided. 

Nick cleared his throat. “There were a lot of families like that, before the war. Let me guess. You were supposed to be interested in tea sets and baby dolls and planning your wedding.”

She scoffed. “And the richer my future groom, the better. I don’t suppose you heard of my family, Detective, being up north like you were. But my great grandfather had a company, Belmont’s Maids and Manservants. We get it clean so you don’t have to, they used to say on the commercials. Started with just a couple of maids and vans in the Quarter, but by the time he was through he had all of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and half of Alexandria using his services. Made a pretty penny.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, watching her hand move across the paper. Hancock noticed a fine tremor in her hands, her legs shaking ceaselessly. He realized she was grinding her teeth. Maybe needing a fix, he thought. Probably why she had been asking about the zephyr earlier. He wondered if anyone around the settlement had any. She finally started speaking again, seemingly just to fill the silence. “Of course, when they came out with the Mr Handys and Mrs Nannys, my family lost all the businesses. And my parents could run through money like water.” 

This time she didn’t break the silence. After a while, Nick offered her a cigarette. She waved it away with a small, sad smile. “You two ought to try to sleep,” Nick muttered. “Might be another long day tomorrow.”

Hancock just shrugged and popped another Mentat. Lydia didn’t answer, grinding her teeth and drawing like nothing else existed. Nick closed his eyes for a moment and wished he could take an actual, honest to god nap. Trying to get these two to take care of themselves was like herding cats. 

Hancock wound up falling asleep in his chair, tricorn hat sliding low over his eyes as his chin fell to his chest, boots propped up on another chair. Nick caught Lydia stealing glances at him before she finally tossed the art pad down on the table, a little violently. 

“I need a walk,” she said before stalking off into the night. Nick had overheard her asking Hancock for chems, had seen her get wound tighter and tighter as the night wore on. He had seen the new faint puncture mark on her inner elbow when she had come back out of the tank room on the ship, just after she’d changed clothes. He hadn’t commented on it. He was a gentleman, after all. But something within him said that she was apt to break down, and soon. Something within him told him to watch her. 

So after he gave her a head start, creeping through the shadows behind her, he resolved to do just that.


	11. Chapter 11

Nick wasn’t the only one watching her. Nemo kept pace with her, watching her from various corners. He knew this settlement intimately, having been here for every new construction and remodel, and he knew all the good hiding places. It was on her fourth lap around the place that he finally cleared his throat and stepped into the light of a small lantern set on a barrel. “Can’t sleep,” he asked.

She glared at him. “Something about being in a cage does that to a woman.”

“Really? I thought maybe it was withdrawal. Kieran heard you talking, to one of your friends. Said you were wanting something called zephyr. I remember that, from before the war. Seems like the only people taking it were hysterical housewives and street people. Which one were you?”

“I’ll give you a hint. I’m not wearing a ring.” 

He grinned at her, and something in his face was predatory, gloating. “Really? I hadn’t noticed. So were you a maiden school teacher then? Or maybe a nurse, still living at home with your mommy and daddy?”

She scoffed at him and made as if to keep walking, but he grabbed her arm. In the shadows, Valentine tensed and slowly pulled his pistol out. 

“Or maybe,” Nemo continued, “You were a dirty whore. Was that it?”

She laughed. Nemo’s face hardened even more at the sound. “I was hardly dirty, Captain. I was in fact very clean and...in demand. I don’t see what that has to do with anything now. Seems like now people are too busy trying to survive to worry about what status somebody has.”

“But me and you know better, don’t we,” Nemo crooned. “We know that this wasn’t the way the world was meant to be. People living in the dirt like animals. Doing whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it.”

“Is there a point to any of this, Nemo? Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk?”

Now it was his turn to laugh, the sound bitter and caustic. “I have a point. A good, hard point. And ever since I turned ghoul, nobody seems to want to touch it. Do you know how long 200 years is? I mean, really is? Of course you don’t. Because you spent that time asleep. If you’re telling the truth.”

“And why the hell would I lie about something like that?”

“Because that’s what women like you do. Women like my ex wife. You lie, and you cheat, and you do anything to get what you want. I have something you want. That zephyr? I have some. Mother Abigail likes us to keep it on hand in case anybody gets hurt. A lot easier to stitch someone up when they don’t give a shit that they’re hurting.”

“And let me guess how you want me to pay for it.” 

He grinned again, his teeth gleaming in the lamp light. “How often do you need it? Every 24 hours?”

Silently, she nodded. 

“Well, that’s the deal then. I shoot you up, you bend over and let me have my fun. Tomorrow night, we do it all over again. I warn you. I’m an ass man. But I guess with a woman like you, that doesn’t matter, does it?”

Sighing, she nodded. “I assume you have a room.” 

Mockingly, he bowed and gestured with one arm. “After you. My lady.”

In the darkness, Valentine seethed.   
*********  
 _Hancock was sitting on his faded red couch in the Statehouse, his arms stretched wide across the back of it, his coat open on either side of him. Lydia stood in front of him, all that thick glossy hair down over her shoulders, falling in soft waves to her hips. She was pulling that skirt up so she could straddle him, and he was so hard that if he didn’t get some relief soon he felt like he might break. As soon as the thought occurred to him, his knife was in his hand. Gently, he slid it underneath one of the straps of her tank top, staring into her face. She gazed back at him, her eyes glossy with lust, not a trace of fear in her as he held the sharp blade so close to her pale skin. He pulled the knife toward him, slicing through the thin fabric, and watched it fa…_

His boots hit the dock with a thump. He growled, his knife in his hand in the waking world as quickly as it had been in his dream. It was Valentine, staring down at him with his eyes brighter than Hancock had ever seen them. The synth’s face was hard to read sometimes, but he’d swear the look he saw now was fury. 

“Get up. We’re leaving.” Valentine turned his back to him and started toward the shacks upstairs.

“What?” Hancock felt a little slow on the uptake here. He popped a mentat almost by reflex. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re getting Lydia, and we’re getting the hell out of here.”

Hancock had to jog to keep up with him. “What the hell are you talking about? You heard Lydia today, telling Mother Abigail she’d love for them to teach her how to master her talents. How do you know she’ll agree to go?”

“I have a feeling.” 

They reached the top deck of the settlement, five stories up on creaking, grayed wood. Hancock almost felt dizzy. He wondered what it would feel like to fall from this height. “Earlier you were calm. I mean, not happy, but calm. What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter, just…”

As they approached the last shack on the level, the door opened. Lydia wandered out, one side of her face red like she’d been slapped. But her body was loose, her expression calm. Behind her, Nemo slapped her ass, laughed, and slammed the door behind her. Hancock stood still, looking from Nick to Lydia and back again. 

Lydia passed them without a word, almost floating instead of walking, heading back for her chair by the railing where she’d left her art supplies. 

The two followed her wordlessly, Nick silently seething, Hancock still confused. 

“Nemo had the chems she needed,” Nick muttered to Hancock as they hung behind her. “He used that to get her have sex with him.”

Now Hancock looked even more confused. “Well, did he force her?”

“No.”

“Then...I mean Nick, you know what she used to do before the war. She was just making a trade.”

“You don’t get it,” Nick spat. “That man was threatening. He was practically slobbering over her, he…”

“Did he actually say he was going to do anything to her if she didn’t?” 

Nick made as if to keep walking, but Hancock grabbed his arm and turned Nick to face him.

“Well…” Nick’s luminous eyes stared at the deck between them now, as if he was ashamed. His mouth worked for a few moments before he got his words out. “Not technically.”

“Did he hold a weapon to her head? Have anyone else drag her in there?”

“Well, no…”

Hancock spoke gently now, treading lightly. He assumed this was one of Nick’s prewar sentiments. Maybe tinged with a little bit of jealousy. “Then I don’t think there’s anything we need to do about it. She’s a grown up. She made a trade, and she followed through on it. It’s not our place to tell her what she can do with herself. I don't like it either, but we're not going to win any points by trying to boss her around.”

Nick growled. He knew Hancock was right, of course. He doubted what had just happened up there was much different than anything Lydia had done before the war. But there was just something about it that rubbed him the wrong way. Something in the way Nemo had acted, like she owed him a fuck just because of what she had been, just because he wanted it. No wonder no one had touched him in two centuries. It wasn’t because he was a ghoul--gods knew John got plenty of action--it was because he was a total jackass. 

They approached Lydia warily, but it turned out caution wasn’t needed. She was slumped in her chair, fingers caressing the color pencils but not actually using them. Her movements were slow and graceful. She smiled at Hancock, and he could tell by the dazed look in her eye that she had indeed scored what she was looking for. She let out a long sigh that turned into a sultry moan and leaned her head back against the chair. There was a little blood at the corner of her mouth, a thin crust of it at one nostril. Had Nemo hit her?

Wordlessly, Hancock rummaged through his bag and came out with a bottle of Nuka Cola, popped the top, and handed it to her. She smiled at him and raised the bottle in a toast before taking a small sip. 

Nick looked about as uncomfortable as anyone could look. “You...ah...you all right?”

She gave him a searching glance before staring back out over the water again. “Of course I am. A little thing like the end of the world doesn’t change basic human nature.”

“Did he...it looks like he might have...roughed you up. A little.”

She laughed. “You have no idea how common that is. Don’t worry. I’m tougher than I look. Some guys, they want to worship you, but it’s never really you, you know. It’s always someone else they can’t actually have, somebody you’re just standing in for. Had a guy once whose mom died when he was five or six. He used to pay me just to rub my feet, comb my hair, suckle at my breasts like he was feeding. Never even got hard. Not that he couldn’t--he had seven kids with this bottle blonde wife of his--but my services weren’t about sex. Not for him. It was about letting him love and be loved, letting him be safe to just...do what he felt. Had another guy who used to pay me just to talk. Just wanted to get advice about his marriage, his kids, his job. Sometimes just wanted to talk about random shit, tv shows he watched, that kind of thing. Blew my mind. I told him over and over, he’d get a shrink a lot cheaper but he said, me, I was...comfortable. Nonthreatening. He knew that no matter what he told me, I’d never tell his job, or the government, or his wife, and a hell of a lot of the psychiatrists, they were as good as government informers. Always looking for the Red under the bed. He was my favorite customer.”

She was silent for a long moment before leaning back to look at the sky. “But then there are the other guys.”

Hancock tried to be patient, but that had never been his forte. Finally he had to prod at her. “Other guys?”

“You know the kind. I’m sure you’ve met a million of them. The guys that want to burn you, smack you around a little. The guys that one day want you to pretend they’re raping you, and a few weeks later they’re the last guy seen with some woman out in the Quarter before she goes ‘missing’. The rich ones buy films with people fucking children, animals, people being murdered. Hell, some of them don’t even need sex to spank it to--the blood and pain is enough.”

“Snuff films,” Nick muttered. “I heard about a lot of them when I was working vice back in Chicago, even heard about some guy crossing the country selling the damn things, but we only ever found one. And the guy who owned that one was already dead. Decided to have a bullet for lunch.”

Hancock stared at them both. “But, fake murder, right?”

Lydia looked at him, her eyes far far older than even the two centuries she’d spent in her tank. “No, John. Afraid not. Two of the girls I knew in the Quarter got involved in one. Not that they knew until it was too late. The guy said he just wanted to shoot a stag film, nothing new, just something with some light nudity and a little dancing. The 'director,' Wally, was just in town temporary. Supposedly on business. The rest of us told them not to go, but he was offering a ton of money. That was just one more thing that made it suspicious in my mind. A few hours later, Cherry's waiting for me back at the bar we used to go to all the time, Tipsy Tina's. Said Daphne, one of the girls that had gone with the guy, was at the charity hospital, saying she barely escaped. Saying the guy wanted to kill her on camera, and did kill Carla. Cops didn't do a damn thing, of course. Not about a dead whore. The few detectives who did want to get involved? Their boss told them no way. Waste of resources, guy was already gone, likely wouldn't happen here again in a million years.”

Hancock started pilfering through his bag for his Jet. His stomach roiled. He wouldn’t lie, even to himself--he liked murder too. There was an adrenaline to the fight, an animal satisfaction in the kill or be killed moment. A thrill in coming out the other side as the stronger one, or smarter one, or luckier one. But only those who were asking for it, those who spent lifetimes hurting other people for fun. He couldn’t imagine getting hard over it. Didn’t want to imagine getting off on someone else’s dying breath.

Not that he didn’t have his kinks. He had been through some interesting times in his life, and though he knew that 42 years was fairly short in Nick’s--and possibly Lydia’s--eyes at this point, it felt like an eternity sometimes. He had never had a high tolerance for boredom. There had been the man from out west, a former courier who had gotten off on putting a bridle in Hancock’s mouth and riding his ass until he screamed in ecstasy. The woman who had wanted him to fuck her while she wore a dog costume. That one had been fun. He smiled to himself as he remembered Fahrenheit walking in on the scene, convinced that all the howling and growling meant Hancock was being attacked by a feral mongrel. Remembered Fahr slowly stripping and commanding the “bad dog” to lick her clean while Hancock just kept riding her. Then there had been the twins, that wanted him to watch them fuck each other before finally sucking him off. It had kind of skeezed him out at first, the idea of the two being sisters, but who was he to judge? 

Then there was his, erm, blood fetish. Period blood, wound blood, it didn’t matter--soon after going ghoul, the smell of it, the sight of it gliding over smooth pale flesh, got him so turned on his dick twitched, like it would detach itself and wreak havoc on the countryside if he didn’t get some relief. He didn’t claim to understand it. When he thought about it too hard, he didn’t like himself for it. He never hurt them without permission, never hurt them if he didn’t see in their faces and feel in their flesh that it turned them on as much as him, but he still didn’t necessarily like his reaction to it. Thought, in fact, that it might be some indication that one day he’d turn feral. Maybe it was a ghoul thing.

At any rate, he certainly wasn’t some virgin, wincing at anything other than missionary. He was a man with a taste for the eccentric, and he had a way of drawing in others who were odd like him. Had a way of putting them at ease enough to share their deepest wants. 

But hurting those who didn’t want it, or deserve it...murder making somebody horny...it boggled his mind. He literally gaped at Lydia and Nick, his brain stuttering over the thoughts and memories swirling around, the oh so helpful images his mind supplied of raider kills he’d made, only in black and white with that popping grainy quality film had. He almost imagined himself trying to jack off to it, but even the thought was too much; he had to shut that line of thought down in a hurry. He didn’t eat much as it was. He’d like to try to keep what he did take in down, not spew it over the settlement’s nice clean decks. 

He realized she was still staring at him, her eyes drinking him in. He would bet a thousand caps she was analyzing him. He assumed whatever she saw passed muster; at any rate, she finally turned back to watch the stars, her voice still curiously monotone. 

“It doesn’t matter fellas. Bombs or no bombs, people are what they are. And some people get off on causing pain. In my line of work, you get used to pain pretty fast. If it’s not a crazy client it’s a pimp who doesn’t like the way you look that day or some freak in a dark alley wanting your money. It’s just the way it works. I can’t imagine it’s changed that much since I’ve been in the tank.”

Hancock found himself pulling one of Nick’s cigarettes out of the synth’s pockets, grabbing for a drink, anything he could reach really. He had known that the world was bleak after the bombs, of course. But even in the midst of the horror, most people found at least some glimmer of hope. Whether it was Kent and his obsession with the Silver Shroud, the people of Diamond City asking Nick to help them keep things in order, or the Goodneighbor citizens fighting against injustice no matter what the cost or the odds, Hancock had seen a lot of people with their backs against the wall, and watched them come out swinging.

But this woman...he had a hard time imagining her train of thought. The way she was thinking seemed to come from before the bombs, from the world that everyone he grew up with simply assumed was a safer, saner place. And the very idea of hope, or decency, seemed foreign to her. 

“Not everybody is like that,” Hancock murmured. 

She sighed. “I know that. Believe me, I do. I know there are good people out there. I just know how to be realistic enough to see that there are plenty of bad ones, too. Probably more bad ones.” She finished the soda and placed the empty bottle in a wooden bin of junk near the settlement’s workshop. “And I’m tired. I’m going to try to sleep while my dose is fresh.”

They watched her disappear into the little communal meeting area where they’d been interviewed. Watched her toss pillows on the deck and turn to face the wall before snuffing out the lantern. 

Nick felt like crying. The same pressure behind the eyes that he remembered from human Nick’s experiences, the same tightness in the chest and heat in his forehead. But of course, in this body, tears were an impossibility. He suspected these phantom feelings he was having were just that--ghosts in the machinery of his mind, physical impossibilities that were only made real by faint memory. He had read about people having phantom pains when they lost toes, or itching in hands that had been taken by a surgeon’s blade. He wondered what it would be like to have that kind of sensation in only one body part, instead of a whole body being one big haunting specter. 

“A lot of you prewar folks like that,” Hancock finally asked Nick, keeping his voice low. 

“Not a lot, no. A hell of a lot of them lived in a fantasy land of robots and pretty dresses and tv sitcoms.”

“You meet anybody quite like that in your time in vice?”

“One. A kid who spent half his life in juvie and the other half getting pimped out by his mother for chems.”

Hancock winced. “What happened to him?”

“Hung himself.”

Hancock pulled his red coat close to him and looked thoughtfully into the darkness where he knew Lydia lay. Far be it from him to make her feel uncomfortable by just coming out and asking. How would he even start a conversation like that? Hey Lyds, ever think of taking yourself on a permanent vacation? Chances were good she wouldn’t tell him anyway. 

But he would watch her, he resolved. He had spent most of his adult life skulking behind the scenes, lending a helping hand where he could and trying to glue the broken back together. No reason to stop now.


	12. Chapter 12

Surprisingly, other than dealing with Nemo, the trio was actually fairly comfortable throughout the next week at the settlement. Nick spent a lot of time helping the settlers repair things; he had actually enjoyed his time as a handyman in Diamond City more often than not. He could lose himself in the work, in the play of his fingers with the tools. There was something about taking old junk and turning it into something useful that he thought might be a good metaphor for how he saw himself--an old junked robot that managed to make itself useful. 

Hancock and Lydia, on the other hand, spent most of their time with Mother Abigail, discussing the various ways to manipulate energy. 

On day one, Mother Abigail tried to teach Lydia about plants, and how to feel their potential in their seeds. How to tell what would make them happy, and what would kill them. Lydia managed to make a seed sprout in her palm after a while, but otherwise proclaimed that she did not understand how to read them. The woman and her child who had played with the water tried to teach her how to do the same. Several frustrating hours later, Lydia gave up on this, too. Communicating with animals seemed to go much better for her, ending in a realization that she had engaged in this form of communication with Chairman Meow on several occasions--receiving images, smells, sensations from him, fragments of the sensory impressions he himself had gotten from his environment. It wasn’t as easy as speaking to another human in their same language; it was mostly a matter of interpreting. But she proved able to do it, to a surprising degree. 

For her part, she had tried her best to teach the others how to play with fire, starting with trying to help them manipulate the flames of candles before moving on to trying to create the flames from nothing more than the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen around them--but only Mother Abigail proved to have the ability to move the candle flame, and none of them had been able to begin flames of their own. It was enough to make Hancock insane. 

“How does this work,” he asked her in frustration after supper one evening, when the settlers were all going to their own shacks with their families to tell stories and do crafts before bed. “I don’t understand. Why can’t you do everything they can do, and why can’t they do what you can do? If it’s all just energy, why can’t everyone do the same shit?”

She sat across from him on the cool, smooth deck, sharing a bottle of Nuka cola with him. He had noticed, mostly from the first time he’d met her, that she seemed to have no trouble adapting to his presence, to his appearance. She never shied away from him when he touched her in passing. When he offered to share his soda, she took it from him and took a sip without ever wiping his spit off of the bottle’s lip. He would have expected a prewar girl to find him more disgusting even than the humans of the Commonwealth and all their creative names for what he was, but instead she simply accepted him, from day one.

That was a talent even better than her playing with fire, he thought. He noticed she was that way about everyone around them. For someone with such a bleak view of the world, of human nature, she seemed to be able to parse out fairly quickly what someone’s main goals were, and what they’d do to get them met. She seemed to be able to read people’s faces and body language better than anyone he’d ever seen, and she seemed to simply accept that they were who they were. She never shied away from Nick either, or did anything to remind him that he wasn’t as human as his memories insisted he was. She treated the both of them like men. 

She shrugged at him and passed the bottle back over. “It’s not just the energy you’re manipulating. You’re changing yourself and your place in the multiverse, more than the energy. Changing how you interact with the world.”

He grunted. “Still lost.”

“It’s like this…” She thought for a moment, trying to put her words together. “Let’s say you want to change time, make it pass faster. Well, you can’t do that. Because all times exist at the same time. Time doesn’t move. We move through time. If you try to change how time moves, you’ll never succeed. But if you can change your position in time, change your way of interacting with it, then you can make your perceptions of it change.”

He stared at her. “So, right now, it’s still the day the bombs dropped.” 

She nodded. “Believe it or not, yes. Somewhere in the fabric of space time, that moment, and the places that moment is attached to, still exist. Just because the consciousness we are at this time is not in that moment, doesn’t mean that moment doesn’t exist.”

“How do you know? Is that something you read in one of your prewar quantum physics books?”

“Not...exactly.”

“Then how?”

She stared at the deck. He noticed she did that alot--refused to meet people’s eyes. “You wouldn’t believe…”

He rested his hand on hers for a moment, her skin as smooth and cool as marble beneath his hot scarred fingertips. She looked up at him, then smiled softly.

“Okay, you might,” she allowed. “Are you a religious man, John?”

He frowned. “I’ve met a lot of people who were. People who believe that radiation is God. People who believe in Christ and the Old Testament. There were a few muslims running around the Commonwealth, had a settlement of their own way up north. But me? I don’t know what I believe in. Why, what do you believe?”

“I don’t know what to believe about everyone else’s gods, but I’ve seen mine. He has taken me places. Shown me things. Maybe…” She looked deep into Hancock’s eyes, and he felt his stomach blossom with warmth, like he’d just had a shot of bourbon. Oh yes, he had a problem all right. He woke up wondering about her in the morning. Liked to check in on her before he went to bed. 

He really didn’t like where this was going.

She took his hands in hers and laid them on his lap, palms up, then placed her own palms against his. “I think, maybe, with you being a ghoul, you can understand this one. Didn’t you say the other day that you can feel radiation on your skin?”

He nodded.

“Close your eyes, John.”

“Why?”

“To help you concentrate on what you feel.” 

Her smile was warm, soothing. He wasn’t used to giving someone this kind of power over him, the ability to take him out when he wasn’t looking, to surprise him. But he could no more deny her than he could stop breathing. He closed his eyes and immediately felt the setting sun on his skin. He remembered the sensation from when he was human as being just warmth, but now that he focused on it, he realized there was a faint tingle there, a tickle, not unlike the sensation he’d gotten from the waters around New Orleans--just weaker. 

“You feel the radiation from the sun?”

“Yeah.” 

“I’m going to see if you can catch what I throw you,” she said. 

“How can I catch anything with my eyes closed?”

She laughed. “Metaphor. Just wait for it.”

He could feel her palms on his, her hands suddenly warming, growing hot. The same kind of tingling sensation he got from radiation was in his palms, and it was growing fast, slithering up his arms, up his shoulders and neck, his face, and

_He was lying on his back staring at a ceiling. It was tiled with sheets of tin that had been pressed into ornate leaves and vines. The view shook forward, back, forward, back, in rhythm and he heard a man’s voice saying “Yeah baby, just like that” and_

_There was a man hovering near the ceiling. A patch covered one eye and his face was lashed in scars, his grey hair wild around his shoulders. His good eye was inky black, no whites to it, just like Hancock’s, and he was beckoning with one hand. A raven sat on each shoulder. The birds were silent but looking around constantly, taking everything in. He saw a small child’s hand reach for the man’s, saw the man pulling him up through the ceiling, into a room where a pallid blonde woman polished jewelry in front of her mirror, up through the attic with its dusty sheets over old furniture and into the sky, into the darkness beyond the sky, into a dense cloud of swirling energy, light and dark forever cycloning around each other. As they passed through this he saw a tree in the center of it all, immense and twisted with roots and branches passing in every direction. Streams of electricity in every color crackled along each branch and root, traveling from one to the other at high speed. The man turned to him and he felt the man’s arms go around him, felt his face rest against the man’s chest. His vision went dark as the eyes in his dream or vision or whatever this was closed._

_“I am Odin,” the man said. “You stand at Yggdrasil, the tree that connects all the worlds. You have much to learn, child.”_

_And then_

The energy is rushing away from his head, back down into his palms, back into Lydia, and Hancock is higher than he’s been in a long time. He could swear he can feel every cell in his body, and all of them are singing, even the damaged ones. He can smell everything intensely--the smoke from the cook fires, the leather of Lydia’s boots, the castille soap that Lydia spent a good chunk of the day making with Mother Abigail. He can smell the spices they’d put in today’s gumbo and he can even smell the dry rice and beans in their burlap sacks in the metal trunks that serve as a pantry. 

But when he opens his eyes, he is breathless. There she sits in front of him, that gleaming braid of hair over one shoulder, and her eyes are swirling with colors, not just the yellow and green and blue but also flashes of purple, sparks of orange and red. There’s an aura around everything in sight, trails of colored light that seem to correspond to the most travelled paths in the settlement--a muddy conglomeration of colors in the common areas, settling into individual colors when they get to the doors of particular families’ shacks. It fades, too soon, and he is speechless, staring at Lydia. 

“Did you get anything,” she asks. 

“Who is Odin?”

Her smile is immediate and huge. “You did then. He’s a god. He came to me during a time that...broke me. He showed me things. Took me on journeys, in spirit. Taught me how to turn suffering into magick. He is the reason I am still alive, and mostly sane.”

Hancock feels an immediate jealousy, a bitter taste in the back of his throat. Before he realizes what’s about to come out of his mouth, he’s asking, “Why? Is he your lover?” His tone shocks him.

She gives him a careful glance. “No. He’s my father. More a father than my flesh and blood sperm donor was, for sure. There are other gods--the god of the Christians is one, and though they may say there is only one god you’ll notice in their own Bible they say that god told them they should have no other gods before him. Why bother with that little commandment, if he was the only one in existence to begin with? There are worlds other than this, John. There are even worlds that had no atom bombs. Worlds where Albert Einstein was incarcerated by the Nazis before he could collaborate with the Americans on the Manhattan project. Worlds where they did have the bombs, but the time they used them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the last. The sheer variety of creation is...staggering.”

Hancock remembered a lot of these names--Einstein, Manhattan project--from the battered history books he used to read when he was a kid. He had always liked school, and to his parents’ surprise they never had to force him to go. He could lose himself in books for days, his insatiable mind devouring knowledge. As long as the teachers let him alone to read, that was. The more structured they tried to make his days, the more he rebelled, until they finally figured out to just let him set his own curriculum. He always wound up being ahead of the others in his classes, anyway. He had never considered himself to be particularly smart--just curious. 

“I would call you a raving lunatic, if I hadn’t just seen some of it for myself,” he said. “I’m half tempted to say I’m hallucinating this whole conversation.”

Neither of them knew what to say after that. They sat in companionable silence for a while, reading their respective books by the light of a lantern set on the barrel above them. Nick waited a respectable time--perhaps fifteen minutes by his internal chronometer--before walking up to join them. He didn’t know if what they had just shared had been necessarily a private moment, but he wasn’t sure what they would think about him having witnessed the entire thing. Wasn’t sure if it would make things awkward. 

And maybe there was a part of him that wanted to see if anything else developed. The synth was old, but he wasn’t senile; he had seen Hancock’s eyes on Lydia every time she wasn’t looking. Had seen the way the ghoul happened to find himself nearly everywhere that Lydia went. Of course, he also realized that maybe his own eyes lingered over the pair a little more often than was strictly platonic, that maybe he was near them a little more often than was coincidence himself.

But this, he put out of mind immediately.  
*********  
Hancock realized he had more problems than he’d thought at approximately the moment he woke up the next day. There was, of course, the usual wondering about Lydia. Bad enough that the first person he had thought of on rising and the last person before sleeping was Nick, but now, now there were two of them--Nick and Lydia. And half the night in his dreams, the two had been doing unspeakably, deliciously dirty things to him and each other. Bad enough to be lusting after the synth, who had never expressed interest in anything romantic or sexual in the whole time Hancock had known him. Now there was Lydia, who from what he understood was interested enough in sex but mainly as a business transaction. He didn’t know if she would have any interest in an actual romance, but with the way she seemed to see the world and all the people in it, he had a feeling that she would be hard to convince. 

Now, to top it all off, as soon as he awoke he was assaulted by a profusion of feelings, smells, sounds, visions. It was as if he was hearing the world through several peoples’ ears at once, smelling every smell in the settlement. He had an image of a woman lecturing him that he needed to brush his teeth every morning whether he felt like it or not, and the woman was a lot taller than him so he assumed he was seeing her from a child’s point of view. He saw a hand, old and arthritic but still strong, stirring honey into a pot of oatmeal. Smelled soap and felt hands rubbing it across his face before picking up a straight razor and starting to shave. He seemed to be experiencing life from a million different angles at once. 

He groaned and rolled over, putting one of the pillows over his head and trying to scrunch in on himself. In a few moments he felt a smooth, long-fingered hand cover one of his, trying to pull the pillow away. He heard her voice through a haze of others, and he thought she might be asking what’s wrong, so in stuttering fragments he tried to explain. Her hand left his, and at first he thought she was going to leave him there to suffer on his own, but in a few moments he felt the sting of a needle at his inner elbow and the soothing warmth of some chem entering his system. The visions and sounds and smells and sensations eased up a little, becoming a little hazy as his ability to feel his own body trickled back in. Now he could hear her better. 

“A little stimpack. I know it’s not a physical wound, but it also decreases adrenaline. That should help you get control over this a little easier.”

She pressed her hands over his again and slowly, as the tingle of the same energy she’d flooded him with yesterday entered his flesh, the other people’s experiences faded until it was just Hancock and Lydia. He could feel a brief throbbing pain in his ass, the subtle pull of torn flesh in stripes on his hips, and wondered if he was feeling what Nemo had been doing to her. Then that, too, was gone, and it was just him again. Slowly he pulled the pillow off of his head and sat up to look at her. 

“What did you do,” he asked, his voice still hitching a little between words.

“First took care of your body chemistry, then used some of my energy to try to put up some blocks between you and the rest of the world. It makes sense, I guess. With your sense of justice, and how sensitive you are.”

“I’m not sensitive,” he said, a knee-jerk reaction to a crime he’s been accused of all his life. Every time he complained to his family about the problems some of the people in the lower stands or some of the kids he went to school with had, he was being too sensitive. When he railed against his brother for throwing ghouls out of Diamond City, once again, it was just him, being sensitive. What did the plight of ghouls have to do with a young, handsome blonde John McDonough, throwing himself from woman to woman in Diamond City and Goodneighbor? Fahrenheit accused him of it all the time, when he put himself in danger to try to help someone. He was the mayor, she’d argue, and as such he had a responsibility to the town to look after himself first. He was too soft a touch. But even as he grumbled at Lydia, he knew she didn’t mean it as an insult, and the words were hardly out of his mouth before he wished he could take them back.

But she stayed collected and calm. He got the feeling that she could read him as much as she could anyone else, that she sensed that he’d sooner chew off his own hand than hurt her. “You are sensitive, and it’s not a bad thing unless you can’t learn to control it. You’re an empath I think. Let me ask you something. All your life, when you see other people suffering, you suffer, don’t you? In fact, I’m willing to bet part of the reason you’re always hopped up on chems or liquor is because you get all these weird feelings you can’t place, have no reason to have yourself. Things can be going just fine in Hancock-world, and still you’re going to feel sorrow, and guilt, and anger, and confusion.”

He tried to keep a poker face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Oh but he did. Boy, did he know.

“I think you do. I think you’re playing tough out of habit because that’s what you’ve had to do all your life. Because if you don’t pretend you’re made out of stone, you think people will try to trample all over you. And I think you hate yourself for it because you think it makes you weak.”

He didn’t like this at all. Didn’t like how she seemed to be reading his mind, how he felt almost like she was there watching him when he took the experimental radioactive chem that turned him ghoul, hoping it would either kill him or change him. How he felt like she might have been staring at a young John McDonough as he sat on the rooftop of his home back in the upper stands, once again unable to sleep as he felt the emotions of a breaking marriage somewhere in the city below him. In a few moments, though, that familiar wave of numbness crashed over him. 

“There’s that wall,” she whispered, almost reverently. “You know how, deep inside, to keep it away from you. You had to learn that or else you’d have been nuts by now.”

“I’m starting to think you’re nuts,” he said, roughly, and pushed her away from him. Harder than he meant to; she fell from her knees to her butt in one smooth motion from the force of it, and guilt was an immediate gnawing rat in his belly. He couldn’t stand to look at her right now, her expression so accepting, devoid of any anger or shock, almost as if she thought she deserved it, or it was somehow okay. His head was reeling worse than any hangover he’s ever had. He headed for the most abandoned spot he could find; he thought perhaps he could use the settlement’s workshop to climb to the roof of the meeting house. Maybe if he stayed flat on his back there, no one would bother him for a while. On his way out the door he caught Nick staring at him in shock through the window, where the synth had been using moss to insulate cracks between the glass and the frame. Knowing that Nick had seen the whole thing only made him feel more like a piece of shit. Now he wasn’t just leaving, he was fleeing, escaping.  
*********  
Nick hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop. This time. He had been keeping himself busy as always, looking for little things he could do to help the settlement while he whiled away the hours that everyone else was asleep. Finding things to do to help keep himself from thinking too much. He had already replaced several rotting boards, applied a home-brewed varnish these people had been making from various plants and animal fats they’d been cultivating to the rest of the planks, sanded splinters, checked furniture for sturdiness--Nick himself was amazed at the amount of things he could get done in a single night if he was restless enough, and they had been here for a while now. 

He especially made sure to keep himself busy from about 9-930 at night, always somewhere on one of the lower decks. As far away from Nemo’s quarters as he could. He knew Hancock was right to a certain extent, that Lydia was her own woman and was doing what she supposedly wanted to do. But it bothered the hell out of him, the idea of that man putting his hands on her just to work out his own anger and frustration. Nick himself could think of plenty of ways to put his hands on her, with much different motives and results--of ways to make her gasp and whisper his…

He ran a diagnostic. Watched the comforting lines of code roaming across his vision, losing himself again in the series of commands and informatics. No need to go down that thought path again. He knew if she did let him touch her that way, it would only be for something she wanted, like with Nemo. Knew there was no way she could ever find a thing like him actually attractive. And there was no way he’d do that to her. He probably could pretend to himself that she was enjoying the encounter, but if she was going to continue her track of sex without affection, it wouldn’t be with him. He had never paid for a woman’s attentions, no matter how lonely he had been after Jenny. He wouldn’t start now.

When Hancock actually lashed out at Lydia, pushed her, Nick felt something in his processor stutter. No matter how high he was, or drunk, Hancock was never physically aggressive with the innocent...especially women. It was one of the ways the two were alike. Human Nick had been a man of his time, trained to see women, the elderly, and children as in need of protection from stronger men. Nick the synth knew that this was an old fashioned, sexist idea, had in fact had his metal ass kicked by plenty of female raiders and gunners and even though he had come out of those battles intact (mostly), he had a healthy respect for what they could do. But a part of him couldn’t get over that basic training, that idea that a gentleman was meant to be a protector. As for Hancock, Nick just got the idea that the ghoul had an almost idolatrous love of women, all women. Every old woman, like Daisy, he treated like he had treated Martha McDonough--teasing but in the end ever willing to help and look after. Every young woman, even those who had made it clear they had no interest in him as a sex partner, was a recipient of gentle flirting. To be fair, Hancock was prone to treat the males who weren’t out to make everyone else miserable as fairly and gently as he did the women, but there was always a gleam in his eye when there was a woman around. Nick had wondered, at times, if it was a result of his early dealings with Martha; the woman had been the only one in the McDonough family to truly cherish John from childhood onwards, even when he became a chem using sex fiend causing no end of light-hearted mischief in Diamond City. Or maybe it was because he had been fawned over by women for his entire human life; they had loved his finely chiseled features, his brilliant green eyes, that thick glossy blond hair. When he was a kid every woman wanted to mother him, and when he was grown? Well, they wanted to do entirely different things with him. 

This situation was obviously something very troubling for the ghoul to forget himself like that. Nick eased into the meeting shack and fidgeted. Lydia had already gotten herself up onto one of the benches and didn’t seem any worse for wear, but it was impossible for Nick to pretend that he hadn’t seen that. 

“Did he hurt you, doll?”

“No. And he wouldn’t have meant to, even if he did. He’s just scared.”

Nick sat next to her and offered her a cigarette--one of his last--that she declined. “I guess so. I’ve never seen him act like that. So is he a...hell it sounds so ridiculous. Is he a witch, then?”

She scowled at him and gave him a light nudge on the shoulder. “Any more ridiculous than you two finding me from a psychic vision an old woman had out of the blue? Yes, I guess he does have some talents, as Mother Abigail would call them. I told you, I think most people could do this kind of shit, if they had it awakened.” She sighed. “It’s my fault, really.”

“How’s that work out?”

“Yesterday, I was just trying to show him something. It was hard to explain, I...I couldn’t explain it. I figured he’d think I was lying, or stupid. So I figured if I just showed him, he’d get it. So, I...ah...shared my energy with him.”

“Why does that make him having a nervous breakdown your fault?”

“Because I should have known, Nick! When I was trying to send him those images, for a moment I saw this huge wall, cement with graffiti all over it, standing between us. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting, may want to ask him about that later. But I went right over it, and I never stopped to think it might be a vision of his, a representation of what he’s been doing all this time just to survive. And now he’s open again. Imagine your whole body’s just one big skinless open wound, and every breath of air, every speck of dust sparks strings of pain down your nerve endings. Only that’s not all, see, because sometimes they lead to memory, and sometimes they may even lead to visions of the future, and every option you have hurts. He can numb it down with chems and liquor, but he pays a price there, too, doesn’t he? Doesn’t have a chance to figure out what the hell he really feels in the midst of all the numb. Or he can just accept the pain until it becomes second nature and he learns to filter it, but Jesus, with a crowd this big throwing all their shit at him accidentally? He’ll probably have migraines from it. And if I had just left that damn wall alone, if I had just kept my own shit to myself….”

Nick realizes she’s shaking. He puts his hands over hers gently, just strong enough to calm them. “I’m willing to bet, knowing John, he wanted to know.”

“Well, yeah…”

“You haven’t known him as long as I have, Doll. It makes sense to me now, looking back over the stuff I do know about him. Why he spent so much time trying to get away from everybody when he was a kid, sitting on the roof of his house and wandering around the abandoned sections of the city alone. Makes sense why he started the chems so young and why he hurt so damn bad over his brother kicking the ghouls out of the city. If either of us should have realized he had some gift, it should have been me. Hell, I’m the detective.”

She smiled at him, sadly but a smile nonetheless. “I can’t blame you, Nick. You had no way of knowing this could happen.”

“Then you can’t blame yourself, either. Sometimes the only way you find things like this out is by accident.”

“I just...I want him to be ok. There’s something about him, some energy coming off of him that makes me feel…” She went silent for a moment, unwilling to go further. “I just want him to be ok.”

And Nick’s heart began breaking, just like that. He knew there was no way she would ever feel anything for him besides friendship, and he was lucky to have that, but it sounded like maybe she was catching feelings for Hancock. And to make it worse, now here was Hancock, avoiding her like she had tried to shoot him. Nick thought he might be able to stand it if at least the two of them could be happy, could maybe bury his own unhappiness in seeing them together, but at this rate none of them were going to be ok. Not that he was going to let her know that. 

“He’s tough. He’s made it through a hell of a lot. He’ll be back to his old self in no time, all about drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” 

She snorted. “If you gotta numb yourself up, I guess his method is as good as any.”


	13. Chapter 13

Hancock lay silent on the roof, letting the cocktail of bourbon, Jet, and mentats wash him out. He stared at the sky above, onyx eyes slitted against the brightness. The Jet and bourbon were to soothe, and the mentats? Well, he would have thought that thinking was the last thing on the earth he’d want to do right now, but as confused as he was he had to have some kind of insight into what had just happened to him.

It wasn’t Lydia’s fault, no matter what she was telling Nick down below him. He wanted to yell that down to her, but he was still stung and embarrassed. And angry. He had just shoved her, could have hurt her as out of control as he had been in that moment, and she was worried about him. The damn woman didn’t have sense enough to be worried about herself apparently. Anyone with any sense would have written him off, said he could go to hell and they hoped he did it sooner rather than later. But not her. The woman who saw the world as overbrimming with evil couldn’t see the bad in her own companion, it seemed. 

But yes, he had to agree with Lydia and Nick that no matter how he tried to buck against the charge, he was indeed guilty of being sensitive. What he had gone through this morning, it seemed like every wall he had built between himself and memory had begun to crumble, and memories came flooding in, one after another…

_A four or five year old John McDonough takes a toy robot out of the hands of Ronald Sullivan, who would later go on to father Danny Sullivan, security guard of Diamond City. But at that point John and Ronnie are just kids together, playing during recess at the schoolhouse. Ronnie always did get on John’s nerves for some reason, maybe if nothing else his habit of disagreeing with quite literally everything John says. When John says he hopes it stays sunny today so he can go visit the gardens with his mom--Martha McDonough actually enjoys picking her own vegetables, says that’s the key to good food--Ronnie says he hopes it stays rainy today and the sun hasn’t been out all day. Because Ronnie is that kind of asshole, and although he will later grow out of it on that sunny day little Johnny McDonough has had enough. He grabs the toy alien the little boy carries with him everywhere and says, “And I hope your stupid little baby toy gets eat up by a radroach!” John feels a moment of vindication at the look on Ronnie’s face, but when the little boy bursts into tears--because he’s also just a kid and that toy is the only thing he has left of the big sister that left for New Vegas last month to try to start a career in caravanning--John is overwhelmed. Not with shame over his own actions, which would be understandable. Instead what he feels is fear that Ronnie will never see his sister again, mixed with missing her, mixed with humiliation that everyone thinks he’s a baby for carrying it around but then John realizes that these feelings aren’t even his. They’re Ronnie’s. By the end of the recess he has not only handed back the alien and talked Ronnie down, he’s even given the kid his mutfruit pie Martha made just that morning, and he can swear he tastes it as Ronnie does._

_That’s when he starts his wandering around Diamond City, making his way around by feel--mostly by avoidance of the busiest areas. Arturo, who will later grow up to become a gun salesman, is John’s only real friend, the only kid in town John can stand to be around for long. Arturo is somehow closed off to John, has a talent for keeping his problems to himself. Or maybe it’s just that he’s such a calm boy. John has never seen him get into any fights, or start crying; he simply takes everything in stride and, as his mother suggests, finds a way to fix it. Arturo is of the mind that almost anything can be fixed, so why worry about any of it? And if you can’t fix it, worrying won’t help anyway. By the time Arturo does feel something he can’t shrug off so easily, John has put his walls up, and is able to be there for his friend--at fourteen, for his first real heartbreak. He spends a lot of time learning how to sneak around, and in so doing he sees a lot of things that others would never want him to see--cheating spouses, people who do their chems on the sly, old files about various petty crimes. He keeps all of it to himself. Even young, Johnny McDonough knows that revealing some of these things would hurt people, and when he hurts them he feels it. He learns discretion very early._

_He also learns fairly early that a smart mouth can defuse a lot of situations. That he can distract others--and thereby, himself--from their sorrows, if only for moments. He learns how to joke, and learns from the feelings the other people have what jokes really land and which ones don’t. Even at a young age, he tends toward puns and jokes that make people groan inwardly, but it’s a mildly frustrated, mildly amused groan, so he embraces it. It’s still useful to him. He learns that for some reason, when he’s reading he’s so absorbed that he doesn’t tend to notice what his senses are telling him. He reads anything he can get his hands on--tattered romance novels that make him roll his eyes, history books that make him wonder what he’s not being told between the lines, detective novels that will later remind him of Valentine and even magazines about hair and fashion. His favorite though, the one that takes him away the easiest, is a large battered tome of Shakespeare that he finds one day while sifting through an abandoned shack in the upper stands. The different language, the need to consult a dictionary fairly frequently when he first starts, the imagery and metaphors, all of it brings him so far inside his own head that he can’t notice what others are feeling. In the course of his first forty years of life he will read every page at least five times over, and by the time he sets out for New Orleans with Nick he no longer needs a dictionary or history volume to understand it, and he has memorized entire passages. That, too, is useful; reciting passages in his mind can distract him as effectively as reading them, at this point, and though he has learned how to throw up a wall between him and everyone else sometimes that wall trembles a little, and the Bard helps him shore it back up._

_At nine, young Johnny begins to catch more than just feelings, but only from those who are closest to him. He begins to catch fragments of language, images, sometimes whole thoughts. It is a blessedly short-lived experience, but in that brief time he overhears his mother thinking, “Don’t get too attached to this one, Martha. The boy’s bound to die before he’s twenty the rate he’s going. Best to put your love on George.” He knows she loves him--knows by the way she is still so tender to him, even when she finds out years later that he’s gone ghoul. But it’s the first time he becomes aware that his very existence, that who he is as a person, can hurt someone else. Hears his father’s thoughts, too, about how if he had just kept it in his pants he might have traveled, might have a whole different life by now. Hears how his father loves his mother, but grows tired of the Diamond City sameness, thinks maybe if he had gone to the Capital Wasteland or New Vegas or the City of Angels he might have some excitement once in a while._

_At eleven, Johnny finds jet on one of his jaunts into the ‘Wealth. He has taken to sneaking out at night when he’s supposed to be in bed. Sleep tends to leave him too open, and when he first wakes up he’s liable to feel everything everyone around him has to feel for a good fifteen minutes or so. He’s started to get headaches, bad ones, from trying to block it all out, and sometimes his nose even bleeds. Sleep is a trap. He finds that if he wanders he can distract himself from how tired he is, and as long as he sneaks back in before first light he doesn’t get caught. He’s nimble as a monkey, skinny as a rail from a metabolism that runs at the speed of light, and he can climb almost anything--including the makeshift barriers between the upper stands and the unused seating areas that used to host baseball fans. When he’s out in the ‘Wealth, just him and the darkness and the threat of running into real trouble nipping at his heels, he feels dangerous. Feels like he might be Macbeth, marching into battle (only preferably without the tragic end), or one of the hardboiled detectives Raymond Chandler wrote about._

_He hangs on to the jet for a couple of days, hiding it in the abandoned section of the stands. He has heard about it, knows what it’s supposed to do. He was already grown by the time Solomon started Chem-I-Care, but the traders sell chems, and he’s seen--and by proxy, even felt--some of what they do to the grownups who take them. There’s fear, more than a little of it, that it will do something awful to him. That it would be just his luck to get a bad batch that kills him. But then there’s also promise, isn’t there? If reading is enough to get him some distraction, just think what chems can do. He tries it for the first time while he’s sitting on the roof of their shack, huddling under a makeshift tent in the downpour of glistening rain. This is the kind of night he hates, the kind that is too wet and miserable for him to be able to wander like he wants, the kind of night when distraction comes slowly or not at all._

_On his first hit, the shifting green sky of the radstorm slows and brightens, and the world seems to stand still for long moments. He can feel his blood singing in his veins, can feel every pump of his heart and he even thinks he can hear every drop of rain hitting the tin underneath him. That night, for the first time in years, he sleeps without dreaming, and he wakes without the usual chaos. The next night, he takes another hit, and there are two more before the cannister is empty. Each night he drifts off into sleep without trouble, wakes without drama._

_It’s a revelation. It’s a shield, and a friend. Any fear he might have had of experimenting is gone, and he is ready to try them all. By the time he’s sixteen, he is spending the majority of his days--and his nights--high on something or other. Everyone can tell, he knows. He can see it in their faces, hear it in their words, but for once he can’t feel it. They can’t seem to figure out where he’s getting it from--they can’t fathom that a kid like him could make it all the way to Goodneighbor and back, regularly. Can’t fathom where he might get the caps for it. He has taken odd jobs in Goodneighbor, running packages and messages for thugs, mostly. He gets hurt, from time to time. Gets his ass kicked a few times. But as long as he doesn’t ask any questions, and as long as he’s still nimble and able to run, he generally gets away with it all. He spends hours listening to Daisy’s old holotapes of music as she tuts at him and lectures him and tries to feed him, not believing that anyone so thin and so addicted could possibly come from the upper class family he’s told her about. He spends hours accompanying people--women and men--to dive bars, being the eye candy on their arm as long as they keep feeding him chems and booze. And if they expect sex in return? Hell, that distracts him too. As far as young John McDonough is concerned, he’s died and gone to Heaven._

_But then, there are the times that nothing is enough to block it all out. The time his brother kicks all the ghouls out of Goodneighbor, for one. Watching innocent drifters get beaten to death in alleys, or walking up in the middle of a gang rape. Seeing an orphaned child begging for caps in the streets. Nothing can prevent him from being overcome with pain when he sees these things. Even when he can take out those who are responsible, as John Hancock is able to do, he still hurts. He covers it up well, with chems and bad jokes and sex. But sometimes, between doses in the quiet of the early morning, it sneaks up on him._  
*********  
The next few days were awkward as hell. Nick found himself shuffling between Hancock and Lydia, feeling the both of them out. Both of them were declining. Hancock was unusually quiet, a feat that Nick would have said was impossible before, and he found himself actually missing the ghoul’s questions and jokes and patter. And Lydia was uncharacteristically moody, spending all her time speaking quietly with Mother Abigail or reading the records the old woman had started keeping of people’s talents. It was a book the woman had started when she was ten years old, and there was a load of information inside, including verbatim accounts of how people felt about their abilities, how they thought they got them to work, how they discovered them, and what they wished they could do better with them. Once she’d finished reading this, Lydia had started writing records of her own in the giant book, starting from her first vision of Odin through prewar spells she remembered in pristine detail on through to her observations at the settlement. She spent all her time either focused on the tasks at hand or dazed under the influence of Zephyr and moonshine. 

Nick couldn’t take more than a week of this. He started with Hancock. The ghoul had kept his vigil on the rooftop of the meeting shack, coming down only after dark to pilfer through leftovers before going back to his retreat. Nick wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it, the way Hancock scrambled up the side of the workshop, then up the side of the building. He would have thought the ghoul too old to engage in such acrobatics, but he supposed something about what had turned the man ghoul was working not only to keep him alive for an extended time, but to keep him young for an extended time too. It was during one of Hancock’s nocturnal foraging sessions that Nick finally approached him.

“Mind sitting down and keeping an old bot company for a few,” he asked. “I get awfully bored this time of the day. Not much to do around here in terms of handyman services, anymore. I’m about to start cleaning windows with a toothbrush.”

Hancock refused to look at him, but he brought his bowl of succotash over to the table and sat across from him. He stared into his food glumly. It looked like he was forcing himself to eat it. He was down to the one meal a day, something the ghoul could hardly afford as thin as he was naturally. Valentine couldn’t help but to look him over. Hancock’s cheeks had hollowed out. 

“I saw what happened between you and Lydia,” Nick finally said, deciding it might be less painful to just lay it all out. “I know you’ve been avoiding her ever since. I want to know why.”

“Did she send you,” Hancock grumbled. 

“No, you ass. I sent me. It doesn’t take a detective to see you’re about to kill yourself off with starvation. And if my processor doesn’t deceive me, she’s been mixing liquor with her chems and upping her doses, which wasn’t what she was like when we first met her, so I figure something’s eating her. Looks to me like right now, both of you could use all the friends you could get.”

Hancock sighed. “Nick, she doesn’t need me around her. I put my hands on her, and she was more worried about me than herself. She should have been pissed off, slugged me maybe, and instead she just sat there looking at me with this look like...I don’t know, like she wanted to help me. Somebody like that, don’t need somebody like me around.”

Nick scoffed. “That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re feeling guilty. I get that. Maybe embarrassed too, that you lost it for that second. You know what she told me after? You didn’t mean it. You were scared. I’ve known you since you were a kid John, and I have to agree with her. You had just had some weird overwhelming experience, your adrenaline was pumping, and you were scared.”

“I could have hurt her!”

“But you didn’t. Even as far gone as you were, you didn’t. But you’re hurting her now, I think. We’re the people who got her out of that tank. We’re the ones who know about this brave new world she got stuck in and can help her get used to it, and if we don’t stick with her while she figures it out it’s going to be a lot harder for her. You want to make it up to her, that’s how. Teach her how to survive out here.”

Hancock put his head down on the table for a minute, then gave Nick a shy glance. “All right. But if she hates me, smacks the shit out of me, I’m going to say I told you so.”

“I don’t think that’s apt to be a problem.”

“Where is she?”

Nick’s expression was sour. “Paying Nemo.”

Hancock grunted. “Guess I’ll have to wait then.”

But Hancock had never been a patient sort. He tried to walk as slowly as possible, meandering up stairs and ramps. He told himself he was just going to wait on the upper decks, not go near Nemo’s house. He leaned against the railing of the top deck, looking down on the water, when he heard something he hadn’t been expecting. It was a sharp sound, almost like a slap. He would swear the smell of blood, metallic and intoxicating, wafted into the warm night air. He found himself edging closer to Nemo’s house.

That’s when he heard Lydia cry out, and it didn’t sound like a cry of passion. Underneath, Nemo’s voice was gruff, panting. Hancock closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe he was about to do this, on purpose, but… He focused on Lydia, on her energy, remembering how it had felt when she had pushed that vision onto him. Quicker than he was prepared for, he could feel her, could feel the world from inside her, and what he felt made him clench his hands so hard there would be small semicircles of blood there in the morning where his fingernails had dug in. There was pain, hot and throbbing, and the feel of blood trickling down her skin. Pain she had not signed up for, he sensed; he could tell from the sorrow and anger in her, from the complete lack of pleasure, that this was no ordinary masochistic game for her. Hancock put his wall back up quickly, envisioning it growing tall and imposing between his mind and the world. It took a little time but he was able to pull away from Lydia’s feelings. 

“You’re lucky I’m not that picky,” Nemo said. “I don’t know what you looked like before the war, but I don’t think your old clients would recognize you now.” There was another sharp sound, and Hancock put his eye to one of the cracks between boards. “Hell, I can’t stand to look at you when I’m in you.”

“Just finish,” Lydia moaned, “so I can get my dose.”

She was bent over, her skirt pulled roughly up over her hips, her hands pressed against the wall for balance. Nemo was driving himself into her hard. In one hand, Nemo held an old electrical cord. Blood trickled down the side of Lydia’s hip from a loop-shaped wound; bruises and welts mottled her bare back. Then came that odd slapping sound again; Nemo bringing the cord down on her skin. For the first time since he had become a ghoul, the sight of blood did nothing for his dick; he was too enraged to think about sex. 

Hancock’s shotgun was in his hand before he even realized it. He heard a growl coming from somewhere, a sound feral enough to make his blood cold, but realized it was coming from his own throat. He kicked the door open with a force born of pure rage. In a few short strides he was across the room, Nemo pressed against the wall with Hancock’s shotgun barrel hard against the center of his forehead. 

“That’s it,” Hancock said. “You’re not touching her again.”

Lydia had gathered her tank top from the floor and was busily putting it back on. “It’s ok John. I made a deal with him.” Her voice was faint, cold and distant. 

Hancock yanked the cord away from Nemo and held it up. “Was this part of your deal?”

Lydia stared at the floor. “Not exactly. But he has what I need. This is just how things are.”

Hancock threw the cord down. If he held it any longer he was going to wind up strangling the other ghoul with it. He wanted to kill him very, very badly. He glared into Nemo’s eyes. “Where is it? You’re handing it over to me.”

Nemo put his hands up and edged away from the shotgun enough to grab a glass syringe from the side table by his bed. He handed it over. “I’m sure she’d be willing to make her own deal with you. Hell, long as I have the chem she’ll put out for you, too, if I tell her to. We could plow this bitch from both ends, what do you say?”

Hancock grabbed the syringe and poked Nemo with the shotgun. “I say this isn’t all the zephyr you have. Where’s the rest?”

“Hey, that wasn’t the deal. The deal was, one fuck, one needle.”

Hancock pulled his knife and advanced on the ghoul until they were chest to chest. He held the knife a millimeter from the man’s left eye. “Your deal is off. My friend Nick has been doing a lot of work around here, and he don’t use up any of your food or other supplies. I figure the work he’s done is more than enough to pay for whatever zephyr you’ve got. And you don’t touch her. You don’t even look at her wrong. That’s the new deal.”

“This is robbery.”

“No. Robbery would be me gouging your eyes out with my knife and eating them, then just taking what I want. We can go that route if you want.” Hancock’s grin was wolfish, unsettling. Nemo had no doubt that he would follow through on his threat. Even Hancock was beginning to think he would. 

“You’re crazy!”

“And yet you’re fucking with me. Who’s crazier, me with my knife, or you for pissing off the man with the knife? Don’t make me ask again. Where. Is. Your. Stash?”

When Nemo pointed to the wooden box at the foot of his bed, his hand trembled. Hancock kept his gun pointed at the ghoul as he made his way to the box. He opened it slowly, keeping his attention half on Nemo the entire time. Inside, rows of syringes gleamed in the lantern light. Hancock took every one of them, putting them in his pockets. He gestured at Lydia. “Do me a favor, Sunshine? Would you wait for me outside?”

Wordlessly, she did, shutting the door softly behind her. Hancock leaned in close to Nemo, so close that his breath fluttered against the other ghoul’s ear. “Don’t make me come back here, Captain. I hear about you treating anybody like that again, and I’m going to be making my way back to this house. If I have to do that, I’m going to be very, very angry. Do we have an understanding?”

Nemo nodded. Hancock backed out of the shack, keeping his gun aimed at the other ghoul the whole time. 

 

Gently, he took Lydia’s hand and led her down to the meeting house where they had been sleeping. He gestured for her to sit down while he gathered a few medical supplies from his bag, glancing at her from the corners of his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking. Nick had been right, he thought. Her eyes looked sunken, and her skin held a soft greenish tinge. She wouldn’t look him in the face. Now that he had her out of immediate danger, the smell of her blood was beginning to work its way into him again. It smelled delicious. The blood soaking through her shirt and slowly gliding down that pale flesh had held a bit of glitter in the lantern light of Nemo’s cabin, but he had noticed in the dark as they had walked that there was still that soft green glow to it. He seemed to feel his own blood pulsing through every vein, and all of it rushing towards his crotch. But there was no way he would mention that to her now. This was definitely not the time for flirtation. 

_What is wrong with me,_ he thought.

She cleared her throat. “Hancock, I, ah...I didn’t get my dose from him. I was wondering…”

Another person might have been disgusted by her need, but Hancock was well aware of how much chems could drive a person, and of how much the reason a person had begun using chems could drive them too. “How much are you taking now?”

She hesitated. “Two a day.”

“How long you been on it?”

“Since before the war, since...well, a long time.”

“It always been two a day?”

She shook her head. He could swear there was a shine in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Tears? “It used to be one. But...I don’t know, maybe it’s...I just…” She sighed. “I need it, okay? It keeps me from having to think too much. I know it’s weak, I know I need to stop, but I...” She trailed off, helplessly.

Gently, he took her chin in his hand and held her face up. He gazed at her, and she could feel something fluttering in her chest, between her thighs. “You’re going to come to me for your chems from now on, you feel me? Only me. I didn’t know you needed it bad enough to...go through that for it. If I’m not understanding, you make me understand.”

“Okay. How do you like it?”

He could feel what was left of his eyebrows scrunching together. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, do you want me to blow you, or do you like vanilla sex, or…”

“For Christ’s sake, you don’t have to pay me for it.”

She was staring at the floor again, and he could swear he had just hurt her feelings. “If you close your eyes you can pretend I’m anyone, really. I promise I won’t even talk, so I won’t ruin it for you. I know I’m not…”

He interrupted her. “I would love to take you to the nearest mattress sometime and make you scream my name,” he said bluntly, surprising himself. “But if I do, it’s not going to be because you feel like you have to or you owe me. I ain’t Nemo. You wanna pay me for your chems, you do it by taking care of yourself so you can watch my back.”

Now she was looking at him, looking into him. “Then what do you get out of this?”

He sighed. “I get to feel like a decent human being, okay? That may not sound like enough to you, but it’s enough for me.”

She blushed, but nodded quietly. He held up one of the syringes. “We’re going to try something. I’m going to give you most of this dose. I’m only going to leave a little bit in the needle. And if that gets you by, maybe in a couple of days we try a little less. And we keep going until we find a dose that lets you make it through the day, without causing you any problems. Is that okay by you?”

She looked relieved. “I take it you’re not into the ‘cold turkey’ theory.”

“No, I’m not. And whatever you’re running from? Take it from a guy who’s been trying that his entire adult life. Sometimes running doesn’t work. If there’s something I can do to get you a little peace, let me know. Now, where do you usually put this? Muscle? Fat?”

“Vein.”

He smiled at her, gently. “Well, lucky for us yours are easy to spot. We won’t even need a tourniquet.” He cleaned her arm, found a vein. He slid the needle home with one smooth motion. It took a few seconds after he pressed the plunger, but a look of utter bliss washed over her and she let out a soft moan that made his throbbing cock clench up. If he didn’t get away from her soon he was going to embarrass himself. He was just hoping she didn’t happen to glance in the general direction of his crotch as it was. Knowing that something he had done had gotten that reaction out of her was enough to make him high. Or maybe he was picking up her feelings again. Seemed like her and Nick were the only ones who could get through whatever defenses he managed to put up. 

She lay back on a pile of pillows while he started cleaning her wounds, letting herself drift. Hancock struggled to keep his hands--and his tongue--within appropriate limits.


	14. Chapter 14

Hancock had explained it all to Nick while she napped for an hour or so. When she got up and wandered over to the cooking station, where the settlement generally had a covered pot of leftovers to snack on, the two grew silent. The three of them sat together in a little huddle, Nick chewing on a long splinter of wood now that he was out of cigarettes, Hancock cleaning his shotgun just for something to do with his hands. 

“Thank you,” Lydia finally said. “Both of you. Look, it’s important for you to know, I...I wouldn’t have put up with something like that before the war.” She made a soft noise that was somewhere between laughing and crying. “I used to be able to be very choosy about my clients.”

Hancock almost doesn’t want to ask this question, but he has been curious for a while. “Why did you do it? I mean, become a, uhm, prostitute?”

“There are as many reasons as there are whores, gentlemen. Used to know a girl who did it partially to spite her ex husband. Said he called her one so often she finally decided to go out and see what it was like to be one, then found out she liked it a lot better than she liked being married to his dumb ass. A lot of girls did it to afford chems. Cherry used to say she just liked to fuck and knew how to do it well, so why not make money off of it. Knew a lot of girls who just did it for the money. You gotta understand John, before the war money made the world go around, and if you were a woman? You had few options. Once general atomics came out with their robots, the demand for nurses and nannies and housekeepers was mostly gone. You could be a lawyer if you came from a family rich enough to send you through college, but even that was fairly scandalous until most of the men went off to war and they had to start letting women do ‘man’s work’. No elementary school or high school was going to hire me to teach, not with my record. I got busted for prostituting when I was twelve, for gods sakes. You could be a waitress, make just enough money to scrape by with the bare basics. Mostly everybody just expected you to get married, be a good housewife and pop out a few kids.”

“I take it the idea of holy matrimony didn’t suit you,” Nick said.

“I never fell in love. Not the kind of love you’d have to have to wanna be hitched to the same person for the rest of your life. And it wouldn’t have been fair to him if I had. I couldn’t have kids, and most guys, they wind up wanting those. And I have...plenty of reasons no one would want to live with me long term.”

After an awkward pause, Hancock spoke up again. “You said why a bunch of other people did it, but you never mentioned yourself.”

Her shoulders tensed and she stared down at the deck, but after what seemed like an eternity she answered. “I was trained for it. I was good at it and I knew I could make good money doing it.”

“Trained,” Nick muttered, afraid he already suspected the answer.

“By my parents.”

“The bastards sold you,” Hancock exclaimed in outrage. “I thought that was the kind of shit people only did in the wasteland.”

“Oh they didn’t sell me. My father was a businessman, remember? A one time sale would be a waste of a good resource. They rented me. When I was five or six one of my father’s friends started coming over. A lot. Starting making little comments. My mother was the first one to pick up on it. They always argued a lot, from the time I could first remember, but it seems like about that time it got to be more frequent, louder. ‘I married your for your money and it’s gone,’ she’d tell him. And, ‘at least this way she can earn her keep. She’ll never know any different, as young as she is.’ Gods know she told me enough times I was an accident, I shouldn’t even be there. And as soon as they started renting me to Brian, come to find out Brian knew some other people who were into kids.” 

Lydia told her story in monotone, as if she was reciting a grocery list, but Hancock could feel the energy coming off of her in waves of throbbing, heated pain laced with fury. It may have been something she was hiding so well that she was even hiding it from herself, but it made him sick to his stomach, and from the look on Nick’s face if he had a stomach to be sick to he’d be in the same shape. But neither of them said anything as she continued. They didn’t want to jinx her unburdening of it, didn’t want her to have to repeat anything or go back over this again just because they hadn’t been listening the first time.

“That’s how I learned I was a witch,” she said. “When he...was with me...for the first time, the pain was so...I just left my body. I tried crying, I tried fighting, I tried begging and making deals but he wanted what he wanted and no one was going to stop him, so I just...left my body. Just stared at the ceiling and went numb. That’s the first time Odin appeared to me.”

Hancock realized she was telling him the backstory behind the vision she’d shown him, of the kind old one-eyed man and the tree, and his sickness became a living thing twisting in his gut. He remembered how the view of the ceiling had shifted back and forth, and he realized that the shifting of the view was from the body the eyes were in being shifted as someone...he couldn’t even go there. 

“I used to think he was just some daydream. Daydreaming the kind of father I didn’t have in real life, who would take me away from the pain when they started using me. But as he showed me how to do things, as I grew and started being able to do more things, I figured out pretty quick it was all real. Figured it out when I killed my parents when I was eight.”

She went silent all of a sudden, and Hancock’s mind reeled. He couldn’t imagine killing his own parents--but then again, the McDonoughs had never sold his ass for sex either. _Rape_ , a part of his mind whispered. Nothing about what happened there remotely resembles regular sex. Nick had chewed his splinter down to nothing, hard started to chew on the handle of a wooden spoon, and Hancock could tell the way he was feeling he might just reduce that to sawdust too. 

“I didn’t kill them because I hated them. I did. Hate them I mean. That’s what fueled the spell, and when it was over the hate was just...gone. Like the spell ate it up when it used it to kill them. But I killed them because I thought maybe, it would stop it. My mother was first. I thought maybe with her gone, with her not harping on him about the money all the time, maybe my father would do the right thing for once. He would do anything for her, anything at all. I guess I just didn’t...didn’t want to know that he didn’t give a shit. It was easier to just blame her, to think she was making him do it. If you found the old papers from the time, they say her death was an accident, a terrible one but not entirely uncommon. She had been going back to the store, you see. Using the money I made on my back and knees to buy more jewelry, dresses, perfume. So much unnecessary shit, and always the most expensive. And on the way there, her brakes just...fell out on the road. Car flipped on its side, drug her along the pavement a few hundred yards. 

“Closed casket funeral. My father took me to the bathroom in the back and put eye drops in my eyes to make it look like I was crying. Had to make it look good for the public you know. Didn’t need any drops for his eyes though. She was maybe the only person he ever loved in his life. But even with her gone, it kept on. Hell, it actually got a little worse. The funeral was lavish. Had to pay for that somehow, and gods forbid my father should get a real job. Rather let everyone think the family money was a miracle that just kept going and going. It took two months for me to get up the courage to do another spell, but when he rented me out five times in one day I just...I don’t really remember doing the spell. I remember setting up for it, cleaning up after it, but not the actual act itself.

“Same spell, different death. My mother, she went quick. He went slow. Laid flat on his back in their bed for two weeks, shaking and shitting and puking. Kept asking me to call the doctor for him, account of he couldn’t even make it to the phone. I told him if he couldn’t call ‘em himself he wasn’t gonna get no doctor. By the end of it he was too weak to do much more than whisper. I just shut the door and left him in there. House was big enough, if I stayed downstairs for a few months I wouldn’t smell him. Told everybody he had gone into mourning, wouldn’t leave his room. And who was going to go in there to see, really?

“Problem I ran into, though, was same problem they had. No money. The bastards spent every penny I made on stupid shit. I sold my mother’s furs and jewelry to the pawn shop, sold my father’s guns and cufflinks and tie pins. I was used to not eating much. My parents were very conscious of the fact that their investment was only as good as the clientele it brought, so they fed me just enough to keep me alive, not enough for me to do much growing. The clients were after the little girl look, so they wanted me to stay a little girl for as long as possible. My mother even mentioned that they might be able to have a doctor give me hormone injections when I got older to see if they could stave off puberty. But even at that rate, money ran out. At least now, I could keep what I made for myself.

“Got arrested for prostitution a couple of times before I hit 18, but Uncle Brian, my first, was there to bail me out of it. Bribed the cops. Didn’t do many spells for a while there. Was kind of scared to. But talent demands to be used, and before long I was waking up with weird shit going on, things floating around the room, fire sheathing my hands, ice raining from the ceiling, that kind of thing. Didn’t learn how to control it real good until I decided to go rogue and had to teach my former pimp not to try fucking with me. I got to where I could take care of myself though. Did some weight lifting in the privacy of my apartment. After I went rogue I got the luxury of being real choosy about my clients and my off days. But I was still waking up screaming every now and then, when I didn’t take the zephyr, or didn’t mix my batches right. Moving out of that damned house had taken care of some of that, and as far as I know the place stood there rotting alone all the way up until the bombs dropped. If anyone ever found my father’s remains, it was never in the papers. 

“I went into the tank because I wanted to be more than a fucktoy. That little program they were running, super soldiers? I thought if I could just become one of those, maybe I wouldn’t...be scared anymore. Maybe I wouldn’t be pissed off all the damn time. No one would dare fuck with me. And instead, I end up here, two centuries later and I’m still in the same damn place. Fucking walking sperm bank.”

“Don’t,” Hancock moaned. She glanced at him before staring down at the deck again. “You’re not a...fuck toy.” He could hardly bring himself to say it. The hatred she’d had in her voice when she’d been describing herself there at the end was enough to turn him cold. 

She shrugged. Her voice was soft, defeated. “It doesn’t matter, gentlemen. Nothing really changes for some people. This is just...the way it is. The world we’re in. You two, you got me out of that tank, and you tried to help me figure out what things are like now, tried to help me figure out how to survive. I figured you deserved to know what you were palling around with. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave me. Gods know I wish I could. I’m going to take a nap.” 

Hancock and Nick sat staring at each other in silence as she shuffled toward her pallet.


	15. Chapter 15

She slept for fourteen hours after that, barely stirring. Hancock and Nick took turns checking to see if she was even still breathing. But for the first time since he’d met her, Nick didn’t see a single wince or hear so much as a pause in her breathing while she slept; she rested peacefully. Hancock ran interference when Mother Abigail tried to go to her, and again when one of the settlement’s many children came to announce lunch. He spent most of that time reading Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays. It was suitably brutal for his mood.

Nick spent some of that time reading, too. In his case, reading Mother Abigail’s Book of Talents. A few key entries stood out to him:

_  
June 5, 2212_

_I asked Mme Pierre if anyone else ever had the talent of listening to plants like I can, but she didn’t know. She said there had been some who had talents but died before she came to the settlement. I asked her if we had a record somewhere and she said not that she knows of, so I told her I’d start one. Here goes:_

_My name is Abigail King. I’m ten years old and I can talk to plants, and listen to them too. I can tell where they will be happiest and when people plant them where and when I tell them the plants want to be planted, they always do well. I’ve always been able to do it. I don’t know why. But Mme Pierre says, she thinks God gave us these gifts to help keep us alive, and it’s our duty to use them well. So I have been trying to teach the others how to do it, in case something happens to me, like when D’arcy got sick and died. She was only seven._

_I wish my talents included talking to the dead. I miss her. I want to tell her that. She was the best sister anybody could have._  
…  
August 15, 2213 

_Msr Jonard’s little boy, Alain, turned four today, and already I think he has a talent. His little face lit up when he saw his birthday cake, and je promis, it started floating in the air. It was only a little, and only for a few minutes, but nobody else there said they had done it. Captain Nemo looked kind of mad and muttered something like we shouldn’t be encouraging him down the “wrong path”, and said he can’t see where making things float has any value for our settlement. I heard him arguing with Mme Pierre, saying maybe it’s not God’s will for us to be doing these things, but the Devil’s. He said the Devil is the father of lies, and of course he’d want us to think we’re doing right, so we’d keep doing it. He said before the war, anyone who had Talents would have the decency to hide them, not parade them around._

_Mme Pierre said she thinks he’s just mad because he doesn’t have any Talents, except running his mouth and trying to run everybody’s lives. Her words, not mine. Ever since he found out about me and the plants, though, he’s been staring at me when he thinks I’m not looking, and now he’s been staring at Alain. It’s like he’s waiting for us to mess up.  
…_

_August 20, 2213_

_Alain is dead. Msr Jonard is inconsolable. Mme Jonard died giving birth to Alain, and his son was all Msr Jonard had left. Nobody can tell me what happened to him. They just know they found him in the water next to the dock by his family’s house, floating face down. His face was bruised around the nose and mouth, they said, and it didn’t look like any drowning Mme Pierre had ever seen. But that had to be what happened to him, right? Nobody would kill a little boy. He wasn’t any harm to anybody.  
…_

_February 9, 2217_

_It happened again. One of the children, a five year old girl named Dulcie LaRoux, showed a Talent. Her mother came in and caught her talking to the shadows, making them dance. I don’t understand how something like that even happens. Is it just an illusion, maybe? Maybe she can change what people see? Either way, by sunset the little girl was dead. Found floating face down by the docks, just like ‘ti Alain, bruised around her mouth and nose, just like him too. Nobody seems to want to talk about it, even her parents. Her mother even said maybe it was the shadows that did it, but I know sans doute que it wasn’t shadows that got ‘ti Alain. No one ever saw him playing with shadows._

_Nemo seems to be the only one here who’s not looking around every corner for a child killer. The others aren’t saying much about it, but I see them looking around, the parents bringing their children closer.  
…_

_December 11, 2217_

_Dulcie LaRoux’s sister, Lorraine, came to me today. She’s seven, and she’s scared. She said she knows it wasn’t shadows what killed her little sister, because ever since Dulcie was drowned the shadows haven’t been moving like that anymore. She said not to tell anyone, but she can see in the dark, and she can see a glow around other people, like their energy maybe. Said she’s scared if she tells anyone, whoever took Dulcie will come for her too._

_I have no intentions of telling anyone about her Talent, and this book will be kept on my person at all times for a while. Whoever is killing children has a lot to answer for.  
...._

_December 13, 2217_

_The council decided it might be a good idea for Captain Nemo to go out to gather supplies for a while. Told him it was because he’s already irradiated, so the rads can’t hurt him like they can the rest of us._

_Me, I wonder if that’s the real reason. Nemo’s the only one here who has been staring at everyone who winds up having a Talent. He’s the one who keeps arguing that we should be suppressing them._

_And now it starts to look like a pattern. First ‘ti Alain. Then that woman who came drifting through, the one who could read minds. She was here for one night, disappeared by morning. Nemo said she was a drifter, of course she took off. Said she asked him to row her back out to where he picked her up at, so he did. But why then is her bag still here, sitting under the table by the cook fires? Who goes off by themselves into the wastes and doesn’t even take supplies?_

_And, of course, Dulcie. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it’s Nemo, and maybe he’s getting rid of everyone with Talents. Maybe the Elder council can’t prove it’s him, but they’re as suspicious as I am. If they can’t prove it, they can’t exactly punish him for it, especially since he helped start the settlement. But having him leave for a while? That might help save a few people.  
…_

_February 18, 2218_

_Nemo has come back from his long trips. Has all these maps of trade routes, says he’s been travelling with the caravans. After all this time I thought maybe he had decided not to come back to us, or maybe something had killed him. But he’s back, as bright eyed and bushy tailed as ever. Overheard him talking to Mme Pierre over a couple of beers. He says he’s had a change of heart, that he’s seen a lot of things out in the wastes and maybe our Talents really are meant to help us survive. He said he’s not sure what to think anymore._

_That makes two of us.  
…_

_November 12, 2292_

_My name is Lydia Belmont and I am a guest at Belle Chanson. Mother Abigail wanted me to write about my experiences with Talents as she calls them--and Magick, as I call it--in her Book of Talents. She says it’s to teach future generations about what has come before them, so they’ll always know what’s possible._

 

There were a couple of paragraphs of explanations. Pretty much the same thing she’d told him and Hancock about energy and atoms, with the addition of four sentences: “If you’re practised enough, you can do magick with nothing but your mind. Most spells consist of two basic components: psychology (yours or your target’s) and how certain herbs and chemicals affect your body. Pharmacology, of a sort. It’s all about getting you into the head space necessary to make the energy into what you want it to be.” 

He continued to read: _Before the war, I worked in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I was a prostitute. It wasn’t a respectable career, and it wasn’t always a pleasant one. But it paid the bills. The good thing about it was that I was already an outsider, someone who was shunned by the respectable people. This gave me the credit I needed with certain shops. Magick was very much a hidden thing in those days, and those who practiced it openly would probably be accused of being communists or otherwise traitors to our country. So you had to be sneaky, and a lot of people wouldn’t talk to you about it unless they could see you were legitimate. Or illegitimate, as the case may be._

_A lot of people who grew up with hoodoo knew that it was infused by two main things: American Indian traditional herbalism and old fashioned Voodoo, both looked down on by the establishment for centuries. When those who followed Voodoo had to hide their beliefs, their spirits often became hidden in Catholic saints. The spirit who controlled doorways and in between places, Papa Legba, became translated into St Peter. That was the code._

_This was explained to me by one of the working girls one day, when she noticed me playing with fire in one hand and ice in the other. That’s what I did when I thought no one was looking and I was bored, just passing time. I was standing in an alley, waiting for one of my regular clients. He always wanted to meet in out of the way places--less chances of his wife finding out. I had ten minutes to kill until meeting time, and Cherry walked up on me. Turned out, her grandmother had been into hoodoo and voodoo both, and she had raised Cherry in the practices when her mother passed away. It was Cherry who first took me to St Peter’s Pharmacy on Rampart Street, and St Peter’s Bookstore over on Decatur. Both of these stores were, on the surface, fairly ordinary._

_But with Cherry there to vouch for me, I was taken to the back room. In the back room of the pharmacy, shelves were lined with jars of various roots, herbs, oils. There was a shelf of various shapes and colors of candles, large apothecary jars of powders and herbs you could buy by the ounce, ceremonial blades and cauldrons. I got my first batch of Valerian seeds to mix my own zephyr with from them. They even sold rocks and minerals. In the office of the bookstore, a secret passageway led to a small back room stocked with tarot cards, spirit boards, and various manuscripts and spell books. The man there, Monsieur LeGrand, would teach you, for a small fee, how to do your own workings--or refer you to a variety of workers in the community who would do the spells for you. These were the people who taught me how to harness the energies that I had learned to sense._

_They also told me many, many stories about what can happen to those who are careless when they’re slinging magick. People who have tried to enslave the spirits of the dead to do their bidding--and inevitably wind up losing control and getting torn apart. People who consort with spirits that Christianity might call demons, and wind up getting tricked. People who perform love spells, then find out that they aren’t as in love with their target as they believed--but now the target is obsessed with them to the point of madness and may even try to murder anyone else the spell caster shows interest in. Always be careful with what you do. You generally can’t undo it._

Nick flipped through pages of spell recipes, noting that Lydia had written on the edges of several the different things that could be substituted for hard-to-find ingredients. There were spells to control weather, spells to find lost things, spells to win courtroom cases, and spells to remain unseen. There was even a spell to conceive children, and another to end a pregnancy. Various oil recipes like “Come Follow Me Boy” to gain clients in her profession. That she remembered all of this from sheer memory was enough to boggle his mind. 

And yet, the thing that stayed at the back of his mind through it all was Nemo and his possible connections to the drowned children. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he might prove Nemo’s role, and how he might see that the ghoul was finally brought to justice.


	16. Chapter 16

Hancock had finished Titus Andronicus and was considering starting on King Lear--another dark play--when he caught a glance at Lydia’s bag. He didn’t share Nick’s compunctions about respecting the privacy of others, maybe because he had grown up in a time and place when privacy was relatively unheard of. Gently, he dragged the bag over to him, stealing glances of Lydia’s sleeping form to make sure she didn’t wake. He was surprised she had slept this long, but he was pretty sure she was in part forcing herself to. He recognized the rolling over, punching at the pillow and glowering at it before laying back down again as something he often did when he forced himself to nod back off. In his case it was generally because he didn’t want to face a hangover. 

He figured her case was similar, but it wasn’t a hangover that she didn’t want to face. He hoped that it wasn’t him and Nick that she was hoping to avoid. 

There was a vial of dark oil in one of the pockets of her bag. He uncapped it and took a whiff, then couldn’t help but to close his eyes and breathe deep. It was a musky, sweet odor, and though he had never smelled temple incense in his life that’s what it brought to mind. Maybe from something he’d read somewhere. The label, a browned thing with curvy handwriting, read “Nag Champa”. He placed it carefully back. There were a few outfits, mostly more short skirts, and a wooden box with a green and purple tie dyed scarf in it. He unwrapped the scarf to reveal a set of green glass bangles with small gold charms dangling from them. That perfume smell perfused the scarf and the inside of the box. He wrapped it back up and set it aside. 

The real treasure was at the very bottom of the bag. Two clear plastic bags, one inside the other, with a sheaf of pages as thick as his Shakespeare anthology inside. The top page was a thin piece of cardboard proclaiming “Now! Archival Quality, Acid Free!” The paper underneath was remarkably well preserved, and as he started flipping through the pages he couldn’t help but to let out a small sound. 

Page after page of drawings showed him the city as it must have been before the bombs, mostly in full color with a few graphite depictions thrown in. Tiny colored lights strung across wrought iron balconies, shiny cars sat in puddles of streetlight, an orange cat--Chairman Meow?--sat licking his paws outside of a seafood stall. A large church labeled St Louis Cathedral stood behind several stalls of people selling art, flowers, and drinks. Rows of hanging baskets overflowed with plants. A shelf full of colored oils stood beside a man in suspenders and white shirt, his dark eyes crinkled in amusement under his tattered fedora. A man covered in tattoos sat on a woman’s hips, poking designs into her back with a needle inserted in a bamboo rod. Hancock took in a lifetime’s worth of images until he almost felt he had been there. He saw a drawing of a jazz funeral and wondered what the music sounded like, saw a delicate rendering of pale pink azaleas and wanted to smell them.

But the picture that stopped him the longest was a portrait. A dark skinned woman stood half-shadowed by a balcony, half lit by a street lamp. She was all delicious curves and round smooth lines, with large glimmering brown eyes and full pouty lips. A single tear ran down her face. He would swear there wasn’t a hard line in the piece, that the whole thing had the quality of a muted rainy day. The woman was dressed like she might have been a working girl like Lydia--shirt tied in a knot above her belly button, short skirt, impetuously tall high heel shoes. Underneath the woman, in thick dark script, was one word: “Cherry.” Hancock didn’t know who the woman had been to Lydia, but it was obvious that Lydia had loved the woman in some way, from the sheer detail and care that went into the portrait. 

It was at that point that Lydia woke up with a sigh and flipped over to glare at the ceiling. “My body has just informed me that it is no longer taking orders to sleep, for a while. Bastard.” 

Hancock froze, looking guiltily over at her. She turned to her side and raised one eyebrow, seeing her drawings scattered around him in a sea of color. “Enjoying yourself,” she asked.

“Uhm, I didn’t, I mean yeah I guess I did mean to look, but I…”

To his relief, she smiled. “I don’t care, John. I told you the worst about me. What do I care if you look through a few crappy old drawings?”

He glared at her. “Crappy? By whose standards?”

She blushed, but didn’t answer as she started packing her bag. “Well, if you’ll do me a favor, go ahead and start putting those back in the bag. I better get going.” 

He was confused. “Going? What are you talking about?”

“Away. Going away. I assumed after what you and Nick heard last night, you’d want me to leave you alone. I wouldn’t blame you. So, I’m making it easy for you. I’m volunteering to go out on my own. See what’s left of the world.” She was a blur of motion, packing fast, and he couldn’t read the emotions flitting across her face. Fear? Hope? Guilt? Shame? He pulled her down to sit on one of the benches.

“Just slow down, Sunshine. No one said anything about you going out on your own. That’s a death sentence out here, even for somebody who grew up in the shit.”

“Look, I made things awkward, and you don’t deserve that, so…”

Gently, he grabbed her chin and turned her face to his. “I don’t feel any differently about you now than I did before. You’re smart, you seem to be mostly harmless to innocent folks, but you can hold your own when you have to. You don’t fuck with anybody what doesn’t deserve it, and you’re just trying to figure out how to make your way in the world. None of that makes me want to abandon you.”

She took a deep, shaky breath and sat back. “And Nick?”

“I’ve known him all my life. Trust me, he’s not the type to abandon you either.”

“Look, I appreciate the sentiment, but all that stuff I told you guys? I’ve never told anybody that. Never thought I would, don’t know why I did. I don’t...I don’t want to…”

“Look, sister,” Hancock rasped gently. “Neither of us is going to say a damned thing about it to anybody else. We won’t even mention it to you unless you bring it up first. Nick is too much of a gentleman, and I like you too much to hurt you like that.”

“It’s just...now you know me. Now you know how damn stupid I am.”

A voice came from the window behind them. Nick, again, peering through the window. They had forgotten that there was a bench on the other side of the wall there, and neither of them had known that this was where Nick had been sitting with the Book of Talents. “Would you call me stupid, doll? Or somebody’s fucktoy?”

Her face turned pure red at that. “Nick, you know I wouldn’t.”

“Then you can’t talk about yourself that way. Look, you know secrets about us too.”

Hancock smiled. “You know about how I became a ghoul. How I didn’t give a damn if the experimental chem killed me, actually kind of hoped it would. You even know about how I stood by while someone was beaten to death. And you’re still travelling with me.”

Nick sat next to them, and what he said next was in a low voice. “And you’re about to find out what happened to me in the Institute, before I was thrown out in the garbage.”  
*********  
 _  
He would never know what had happened to the old Nick after the brain scan. He would always assume later, once he realized what he was, that the other man had died at some point before Nick the synth was created. Unless he was a ghoul somewhere in the ‘Wealth, but with the old Nick’s restless search for justice, inability to sit still too long, and his desire to follow Jenny into the afterlife, Nick the synth sincerely doubted this._

_What he did know was that his first memory was of lines of code flashing in the dark behind his closed eyelids. Even before he had visited Amari at the Memory Den and had her looking into his code, trying to find the memories the Institute had locked away before tossing him out, he had this: brilliant green against black, rows and rows of neat numbers and letters in perfectly sensible algorithms. That memory was almost comforting._

_He supposed he would never have all of his memories, either from Old Nick’s life or from his time at the Institute. He remembered more of Old Nick before his visit to the Memory Den than he would have figured he should, looking back. He remembered the man’s mother, a soft spoken Italian woman who sang to him in soft accents and made sure he washed behind his ears. A woman who had prayed to God for a baby and had only ever had the one, and therefore cherished him like he was a rare treasure. Even as a grown man he had been able to talk to her about anything, had been able to lay his head on her shoulder and have her comfort him like no one else could. He was grateful that, according to the memories of the Old Nick, she had still been alive at the time of the brain scan, always pestering him to come back home for a while after Jenny’s murder. Telling him he could live at home with them while he got his heart back. That was exactly how she had put it, as if she somehow intuited that he felt like that particular organ had been pulped and pulled out of him. A woman that worried about his constant search for vengeance, and warned him he would get himself killed if he kept going, and then what would happen to his dear Mama?_

_He remembered Old Nick’s childhood of reading noire detective novels, playing cops with the other boys in the neighborhoods of Chicago, and learning how to read evidence. Remembered reading everything the library had about fingerprint analysis and how his mother had gotten him a Junior Detective’s Crime Fighting Kit for Christmas. She had been so patient with him taking her fingerprints, studiously explaining every whorl and ridge in the pattern to her. She hadn’t even complained when he had spilled fingerprinting dust all over the living room, lifting prints from vases, television knobs, window ledges--though she had made him help her clean it up._

_Once he hit his teenage years he had gone through a period of quiet awkwardness. All of a sudden he had a fine eye for the female figure--and sometimes the male figure too, not that he ever would have voiced that thought out loud. But he had no idea how to approach them. He spent much of his high school years learning how to flirt and joke with girls, what faces to make to have them melt, how to give off just the right impressions to girls of different kinds of personalities to make them intrigued at the sight of him. He had been told he was a beautiful young man, a little on the lean side but with large dark eyes and finely chiseled facial features and an unruly mop of dark hair that his mother had the world’s worst time trying to tame. But he was never a womanizer. He led with his heart, and he would never purposefully hurt anyone by leading them astray. Each dalliance he had--and there were a lot of them--he was deadly serious about at the time._

_Every now and then he would get new flashes of memories from Old Nick, usually when he went to a place or engaged in an activity that reminded him of the man. Like when he had heard that Lydia was a prostitute, and had the memory of the corrupt vice detectives. He had no idea that was in his memory banks until that day, when it had burst forth with enough clarity and detail to make him almost think he was watching a movie, except in technicolor 3-D. But until he had gone to Dr Amari, his time from the brain scan to waking up on the rubbish heap, staring in horror at the disembodied limbs and heads of failed synths, was a total blank. Every time he tried to remember, his vision went totally white, and although he didn’t understand how the hell a synth could feel pain, there it was anyway: a massive headache, feeling just as unpleasant as old Nick’s memories of pain._

_It was the trips to the Memory Den that finally opened the doors for him a little bit. And once those doors opened he had for a while been helpless to stop himself from wanting more, even when what he saw hurt. It had taken him a while to put the memories together into some sort of chronological order, but now, although there were still gaps, he understood well enough what had happened to him. Understood well enough that the day he had watched Nate press the button to turn the Institute into so much rubble, he had felt almost high, almost what he imagined John must feel every time he took another hit of Jet._

_When he first awoke, there had been another synth there, much like him but a blank slate with no personality downloads. One of the scientists, a man named Gary, had been talking to another one excitedly. What Nick had gathered from the conversation was that the “blank” synth was a “control subject”, there to show them how a synth would behave with no human programming. Nick, on the other hand, was to be an experiment, to see if giving a synth human memories would make them more effective at...well, everything._

_The first couple of weeks had been dehumanizing, but not as bad as things would get later. He had only been called “subject”. At first, it had been rather boring. He and the other synth had been given series of tasks; put the right shape into the right hole, add and subtract, read this paragraph about see Spot run, blah blah blah. A baseline of abilities, he supposed. Not that they really talked to him about it. None of the scientists there felt the need to tell him much of anything, and when he asked all he received were disinterested grunts before the scientists went back to their tasks, or a sharp reprimand that he wasn’t here to ask questions, he was here to take orders. He had balked at this immediately, of course._

_But it didn’t take long for him to learn that his best bet was to keep his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open. Every time he said something they didn’t like, or got too nosy, or refused an order, he was strapped to a cold metal table and left there alone in the dark. The last time his internal chronometer had oh-so-helpfully informed him that they left him there like that for 76 hours. When Gary had finally come back for him, he had driven the point home with a swift blow to Nick’s lower back with a shock baton._

_“You are a machine, Subject. A machine’s job is to serve the humans that made it. The memories we gave you are there to see if we can improve your performance, not to give you some sense of entitlement. Do you understand?”_

_When Nick had nodded, he had received two more blows._

_“Do. You. Understand?”_

_“Yes sir. I understand sir.” Oh how it had hurt his pride to capitulate like that, to give in, but he was smart enough to realize that a lot more than his pride would be hurt if he didn’t. That was the day he started watching them extra close, looking for some method of escape._

_That was also when Gary had informed him that testing had been moved up to see how synths would perform in more “extreme” conditions. He and the other synth had been strapped to chairs, their arms and legs banded by multiple steel shackles. They had been given a series of sentences to remember. Gary had grinned at him, and Nick remembered thinking this was a very bad sign. Gary had not smiled since Nick had known him, and if there was something here to cause that grin, he was sure it was going to hurt. And he was right._

_“That idiot Becker thinks we ought to download personalities into all of you, Subjects. He thinks it will make you more efficient. Make you more capable of independent functioning. What he doesn’t want to see is that the human personality is frail. Prone to refusing orders. Prone to breaking down.”_

_That’s when the pain started. Electric shocks, beatings, taps into a keyboard that made the electrodes attached to them give them the feeling of being burned or cut. It was all punctuated by demands to recall the sentences they’d been tasked with. The other synth had stated blandly, “My system is in danger of experiencing damage if voltage increases” and “Warning: my optics are in danger of shutdown if more force is used against my head”. But it had been able to recall the sentences perfectly, with precision._

_Valentine had only been able to scream and curse after a while._

_He had recalled those damn sentences for Gary through some of the torture, but after some time he simply gave up. The bastard wasn’t just doing this to prove a point anymore--he had already proven it. If you gave a synth a human personality, that synth behaved as a human would, and if you put a human in enough physical pain their sanity and their ability to function would begin to break down. After all the places and ways he had hurt Nick, he should have been able to write an encyclopedia by now._

_It was at the end of the first session that Gary had shown his true purpose to Nick. He had noticed that as the torture session went on, the scientist's pupils grew larger and larger, he began to lick his lips between blows, to rub at himself. The front of the man’s jumpsuit tented outward and when he had the other synth unshackle one of Nick’s hands to put it to his crotch, he felt that Gary was hard as a rock. Nick had jerked his hand back--if he was ever going to be with a man, it certainly wouldn’t be one like this, one that got off on torturing him. He quickly learned why Gary had built him “anatomically correct”._

_He had torn the memory device off of his head at that point, but it had been too late and the memory had played out. At least Amari hadn’t been able to see it through to the end like he had. At least Amari hadn’t seen the man bending him over the chair, having the other prototype synths hold him down and rip his clothes down. Hadn’t seen Gary ride him hard, panting insults in his ear while the blank faced synths stared straight ahead, simply waiting for orders. Hadn’t seen him asking the other scientists if they wanted a turn, or the two that had taken him up on it. After all, Nick was just a machine. One of them had even laughed, said they should program him to suck dick._

_Nick had gone back to the Memory Den only once after that, to help Nate find his lost son. Amari was a woman of discretion, and grace; she had never told anyone, including her wife Irma, why Nick had stopped his visits._

_Nick had never pried into his own head again after that, at least not where the Institute was concerned. Had he known what he would find, he would have been perfectly happy to accept that trash heap as his only memory of the Institute._  
*********  
“Jesus,” Hancock breathed. “Is everybody’s life fucked up?”

“It would seem so,” Nick said dryly. “At least, everyone I know seems to have something. Nate’s cryogenics/lost son/dead wife thing, Preston losing almost all of his friends and comrades, the Railroad’s incident at the Switchboard...Things are hard all over.” 

Normally Hancock would have tried to turn that into some kind of double entendre, but for the time being his taste for jokes was stifled. Nick’s face became blank, unreadable.

“I didn’t tell you that story for you to go feeling sorry for me. I was just trying to make the point that what people do to you out here...it doesn’t say anything about who you are. It took me a long time to accept that. It wasn’t about who I am, or what I am. It was about what Gary and his friends were. Sadists. The things that happened to you? Don’t make me want to be your friend any less. They don’t make you bad, or disgusting. Human nature being what it is, there are a lot more people out here who have been through the ringer than you might think. People who would understand, and not think any less of you for it. If I only wanted friends who had easy lives, I would be friendless.”

Nick and Lydia shared a long look, their eyes focused intensely on each other, and if Hancock didn’t know any better he would say they were reading each other’s minds, hell, reading each other’s souls. He shifted uncomfortably. Finally Lydia nodded and Nick seemed to relax, his limbs loosening all of a sudden. Nick changed the subject for them.

“There should be supper pretty soon. The two of you are under my care, and it would be a shame for me to let you starve. Come on. Get washed up.” 

“Yes Dad,” Hancock muttered. 

“Hey, you’re lucky I don’t tell you to wash behind your ears. Oh wait, those fell off ages ago…”

Hancock smacked him on the upper arm, but the punch lacked force. Nick seemed to be trying hard to lighten the mood, to get things back to some semblance of normal. Hancock had known the synth a long time, knew how likely he was to keep himself closed off to everyone else, to keep his dignity intact at the price of silence. He couldn’t imagine how hard it had been for Nick to tell them that, but to try to help Lydia’s feelings he had taken that plunge. 

If Hancock had been in love with Nick before, now he was hopelessly so. His companions were going to kill him off yet.


	18. Chapter 18

Once the crazed pirate-ghoul was out of his house, it took Nemo about an hour to calm down. Almost immediately he snuck out to follow them, to see what happened next--but he made damn sure to keep to the shadows. He kept flashing back to that moment when the knife had been in front of his eyeball, when he had been transfixed by that one reflected point of lantern light at the very tip. That moment when it had felt like even a flinch would have taken half his sight away. He couldn’t believe the audacity of it. He, Nemo, had built this settlement from the ground up. It had been him who had brought them here, practically saving them from running into God only knew what out there. It had been him who had been supplying the bitch with her chems, and if he had smacked her around a little and called her a few names, it had only been to keep her in line so she wouldn’t pollute half the settlement, sleeping around with anyone else but him. It had been to keep her off guard so she wouldn’t start thinking too much about going anywhere else.

He couldn’t imagine why Hancock had done it, was the other problem. He had offered to share the woman with him, for free even, thinking that if it was just jealousy or sex on Hancock’s mind this would make him happy. When the ghoul had turned him down he thought maybe Hancock just wanted her to himself; maybe he was going to use the chems to get her to comply with him just as Nemo had. Instead, as he listened from the deck above the meeting house, he heard Hancock turn the woman down, heard him tell her she didn’t owe him anything.

Hancock’s blathering about feeling like a decent human being aside, Nemo had a feeling that couldn’t be it. Especially if Hancock had been born into this instead of having to adapt like Nemo had. After the bombs, you took what you could get, and everyone had an angle. Well, except for his peaceful little settlers, but they had been insulated from the world outside. Nemo saw them more as pets than anything else. A few of them, like any pet, might bite him if given half a chance and little enough supervision, but for the most part they were sheltered and had little idea of what the world was like past their swamp.

He had been out there, before making this settlement and after. He had fought raiders, met with caravans, taken all the risks of being outside to bring back supplies they couldn’t make or grow themselves, and of course to guard that damned Westek ship. And thinking of the ship brought another possibility to mind. Maybe Hancock had done this, and had insisted he didn’t need payment, because she was somehow controlling his mind. Maybe the experiment had done something to her to make her capable of it. He had never felt her invading his mind, or making him do anything, but maybe Hancock was weak where Nemo was strong from his centuries of hard living. 

Either way, his way forward was clear. He had made a mistake, and not the one he’d thought he’d made all those years ago. He had not gotten rid of a witch since he had come back from his exile the council had imposed upon him decades ago. They had never been able to prove it was him, of course, but they had suspected. They had to have, otherwise why the sudden insistence on sending him out, something they had never done with anyone before or since? He had gone out into the world, still a little confused, doubting himself hard. The Bible had said it, though: thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And if these people who had what Abigail and her council called “Talents” weren’t witches, what was a witch? Sure, the ones he’d seen had never, say, cursed a crop or made a man’s pecker fall off, but then the crops were what kept them fed and children were seen as a blessing. They hadn’t had the motivation to do it yet.

But then again, the council had been convinced that these Talents of theirs would help the settlement to thrive. He had seen the benefit of a Talent like Abigail’s immediately, as their crop yields doubled as soon as they started following her advice and letting her work the garden plots. They had begun having such bumper crops that they had had to start canning their crops and had even had enough surplus to trade for the first time since their founding. This surplus had ostensibly been their reason for sending Nemo out to begin establishing trade relations with other settlements. But some of the talents had seemed to be more dangerous in nature. The little girl who had played with the shadows, for instance. Was she really playing with shadows--or was she playing with spirits of the dead? Or even demons? Inviting things into the settlement that would destroy them from the inside out, perhaps? He had to get rid of her, for the entire settlement’s sake. They may never see it, but he knew, in his heart, that this was something his God would have asked of him. It never occurred to him to ask himself why God would have made a witch, or allowed a witch, if He wanted them all dead. 

But while he had been out, he had seen so much suffering. Everywhere he had gone, people were hanging on by a thread. Most of them were living off of hunting and centuries old canned food, barely supplemented by unreliable crops that sometimes failed. And from what he’d heard, while the canned food was usually somehow safe enough to eat (at least, compared to starvation), cases of food poisoning, sometimes fatal, were not unheard of. Everywhere violence threatened to erupt at any moment as people scrabbled over the supplies that were left over or tried to fight off raiders who decided it was easier to take what they needed than it was to try to hunt or grow food themselves. Rape, murder, theft--the world was an eye for an eye, and it seemed that everywhere he looked he saw only the walking wounded. 

Then there were the “natural” deaths that humans had been prey to before the miracles of science, medicine, and chemistry had come onto the scene. Isolated with no access to trained doctors or official medications that had either expired or been used up by then, a hell of a lot of people were dying from illnesses that, before the war, could have been controlled with a few pills or a surgery. Ruptured appendixes, flus that turned into pneumonias, cholera and dysentery from dirty water. Even childbirth was a common killer out in the wastes, and if the process of birthing itself didn’t kill the women the crying of their babies was a clear beacon for raiders, deathclaws, and other predators. 

So when he had initially come back to the settlement and seen his people, healthy and fleshy and calm, he had thought that perhaps he had been wrong. Their settlement was thriving when so many others were dying, and it seemed that Talents--like Tant Jolie’s abilities as a midwife, Abigail’s affinity for plants, and Walter LaRoux’s ability to forecast the weather as much as a week ahead of time merely by looking at the sky--were to thank. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps these Talents weren’t signs of witchcraft, but merely gifts from God. After all, saints had levitated, talked to animals, walked on water, or performed other miracles that might, to the untrained eye, look like witchery. If these Talents had been evil or of the devil, surely they wouldn’t have been so helpful. Surely by now he would have seen some signs of trouble in the settlement. 

But this bitch, this purple-haired whore, was making him rethink it all, again. Some of the Talents he had seen of late didn’t appear to have any bearing on the community’s survival. Making water dance? Yet another one able to make things levitate? An ability to see an object’s history by touching it? These things had no practical application in making his community stable. And to make things worse, since this bitch had come to the settlement, there seemed to be more awakening to Talents every day. The Smith boy had awoken just that morning stating that he had dreamed he could fly, then proceeded to actually do it. A few days ago George Castillo had learned how to make fire from his hands like Lydia could, and Mother Abigail too had learned how to manipulate flame, after hours of practice. Dara Mendez had learned she could bend metal with the power of her mind alone. He supposed she might be able to use that to make weapons or something. Either way, it seemed that Lydia was making these Talents, this possible disease, spread amongst his people. He should never have brought her here. In fact, should have killed her as soon as he’d seen her. Nick had proved himself useful as a handyman, and it would have been a shame to have lost his services, but the idea of filling Hancock full of bullets made him smile. 

And if she could make the Talents spread in his settlement, might she awaken them in other places? Perhaps this was why he had been spared when his cousin and his mother had been taken on the day of the bombs. Perhaps this was what had allowed him to keep living on in his miserable, pain-wracked body for decade after decade when, by all natural laws, he should have been gone long ago. Perhaps he had a mission from God to make sure that this cancer didn’t take root here. He might be able to stop some massive plan the Antichrist had for making the end of the world last forever, for denying God the renewal of his people and their faith that the bombs could have sparked. 

Nemo had no idea he was laughing aloud, his peeling lips pulled back from his teeth like a growling dog’s, saliva dripping onto his chin. He had no idea that one of his settlers was watching him and backing slowly away. And he had no idea that the blonde, blue eyed figure that suddenly appeared to him in a haze of golden light wasn’t really there, except in the rotting chemistry of his own mind.


	19. Chapter 19

The trio was now inseparable after what had happened with Nemo. Nick couldn’t bear to let his two companions out of his sight for long. After what he had read in the Book of Talents, after hearing what Nemo had been doing to Lydia when Hancock had arrived, he had a feeling the man was somewhat less than sane, perhaps always had been. He wasn’t a feral ghoul by any means, but Nick had known one other like him before. Someone who had always been less than sane, and whose crazy had nothing to do with ghoulification. The next morning, when the topic inevitably turned to Nemo and whether they thought he might try to retaliate, Nick found himself telling them about the other ghoul.

Her name had been Agnes Delacourt, and he had known her in his human body before the war. She had been a frequent guest of the jail. She had been one of the mob boss’s girls, a frail little red headed thing with elfin features and vivid blue eyes. She had been beautiful, but the apparent frailty of her body had been deceptive. 

Nick would never have matched the files to the woman without the photograph. When she was nine, she had been sent to a mental health wing of a local hospital when her mother had found her outside. Initially her activity could have been mistaken for innocence; she had been having a tea party, like many little girls had been doing for centuries. But instead of dolls or teddy bears in the tiny chairs in her back yard, Agnes had been holding court over a trio of dead ducklings from her mother’s pond. She had found the animals already dead of natural causes, and a veterinarian had confirmed that they had passed from a common illness--but the act of using the corpses as dolls had been enough to set off warning bells. 

By age ten, the girl was sent to a mental institution for banging another little girl’s head into the bathroom floor until she cracked the girl’s jaw, nose, and cheekbone. She had told the teachers that the girl had been trying to steal her soul. The rest of her file had been filled to the brim with similar stories of her delusions, hallucinations, and outbursts. She wound up being in jail or the asylum more often than she was free, and when Nick was in the mood to spend a futile couple of hours trying to get information about the mob, he sometimes went to see her. 

He had run across her again a few years before Hancock had killed Vic. She was one of Vic’s goons. Ghoulification had stolen her vivid hair, those cute elfin features and that smooth skin. But it had given her longevity. Not that her expanded lifespan had resulted in anything like enlightenment. Oh, no. Instead she had spent a couple of centuries slowly going farther down the rabbit hole, until, by the time Nick found her while he was out on a case, she spent the majority of her day talking to creatures and people who weren’t actually there. Vic kept her around as an attack dog, using her innate capacity for batshit crazy levels of violence and her creativity in torture tactics. Nick had put her down as much out of pity for her as to save future lives, including the life of the man he had been sent to find. The man had been in a cell in Agnes’s apartment in what had once been downtown Boston, waiting for her to decide what the voices in her head wanted her to do with him. She had sworn Vic had nothing to do with the man’s taking, that he was in fact the reincarnation of one of her mob lovers, and she was waiting for him to recognize her.

Batshit crazy.

Hancock frowned. “You don’t think that’s going to be me one day, do you? Following the invisible people around?”

Nick shook his head. “That was kind of my point in telling you. Agnes had always been like that, from the time she was a child. What happened to her wasn’t going feral. It was just the way she was built.”

“I think maybe we have to leave now,” Lydia said softly. “Having us here in front of him is just going to be rubbing salt into the wound. The more he has to look at us, the more likely it is that he will eventually act out. Abigail and the rest won’t be a problem, not anymore. They seem to understand that we’re no threat. And they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, so it’s not like they need us.”

“If Nemo tries to be a problem again I can always give him a repeat lesson,” Hancock growled. 

Lydia laid one hand gently on his and smiled. “I doubt that will be necessary, John. I’ve never had anyone stand up for me like that. Never had anyone willing to go that far for my sake.” 

Hancock could feel his breath going again, could feel that tightening in his hips, that throbbing going into his groin. He had no words for her. She pulled away from him, too soon as far as he was concerned, but he could feel a lingering coolness where her smooth cool skin had touched his heated scars. Her touch was soothing to his tattered flesh, like ointment. He wasn’t sure if that was from her skin being cooler than usual, or if it was something psychological on his part. Maybe it was a little of both. 

Nick simulated clearing his throat. “We still haven’t decided the most important thing. Where are we going after we leave here?”

All three were silent for a few moments, thinking. Nick finally broke the silence. “I guess we could always check back in on the Commonwealth. See what’s been happening while we were gone.”

Hancock started fake snoring.

“All right, smartass,” Nick groused. “You come up with something then.”

“Well, to be honest with you, I’m kind of curious about all that radiation out in New Orleans. That just isn’t natural man. For it to all be concentrated in the water like that, but there’s no sign of any bomb going off? Something’s up. Why don’t we see what that’s all about?”

Nick nodded. “I do like a mystery.”

They looked to Lydia, not sure if she would welcome or run away from a chance to go back to her old haunts. She looked grim, but said “I’m kind of curious about how things have held up after all this time. Maybe if I can start learning about this new world from a place I was already familiar with, I can learn faster. I mean, I had never been to Boston to begin with.”

“I’m sure you would be able to tell what was postwar by all the dirt and destruction,” Nick said dryly, “But the idea does have merit.”

Hancock grinned. “Besides, I’m the only one of us here who’s never really been to New Orleans. I mean, not if you don’t count that one night, and that was mainly running away from a storm. I didn’t get to really see much. You’re not going to deprive me of a new experience are you?”

Nick snorted. “Sure. We’ll take you out for a Hurricane and buy you a keychain with a picture of the city on it. Make sure you flash your tits at the locals for some beads.”

Hancock ran one hand up his torso in a parody of prewar pinup style, arching his back and throwing his head back so far that his hat fell off. “You know I’m proud of my body. Let ‘em stare at my perfect curves.” 

Lydia and Nick shared a laugh, and just like that the trio was less awkward somehow. None of them would forget the stories they’d shared with each other, not truly, but for now they could forget the feeling of it in a shared affection and amusement. Hancock just had a knack for bringing out the best in people--and synths, and ghouls. 

Of course, he could also bring out the worst.

Nick clapped his hands to his knees and got up. “Well, in that case, time for me to make another round, see if there’s anything I want to finish up while you two get ready to go.”

With a renewed energy, they all set about making their preparations.

Nemo watched from the shadows, nodding as he listened to his golden apparition.


	20. Chapter 20

The farewell was surprisingly emotional, if brief. Nick was surprised that several people came to thank him for repairs that he hadn’t thought they’d noticed. Hancock and Lydia were the recipients of hugs from several of the Talented, and though the trio tried to tell the settlers they didn’t need any supplies for the road they were given a jar of honey, a sack of rice and beans, and a few wrapped packets of cooked fish for the road. None of the trio had realized that these people had come to get quite so attached to them. Lydia had been particularly excited about the honey, telling them that it was good to use as a wound dressing to pull infection out of stubborn wounds and boils. 

The day was beautiful, the sun barely peering from behind slightly greenish clouds and giving the whole swamp a slightly fae glow. They drove slowly, with Hancock taking pictures every so often and Lydia drawing while Nick piloted the boat gently. They weren’t in much of a hurry, none of them knowing quite what they would do when they reached the city. They just knew they needed to be away from Nemo, and for now each others’ company and the view of the wildlife was enough.

While his companions were busy, Nick allowed himself a little time to look them over without them noticing. He found himself admiring Hancock’s slow, lounging movements, and how well it contrasted to the rapid but finely controlled movements of Lydia’s hand across the paper. Enjoyed how the sun made some strands of her hair look almost reddish, and how Hancock’s eyes narrowed in laughter every so often at something Lydia said; the two were sarcastic to a fault and he found their banter to sometimes be frenetic and hyper. He had thought himself incapable of having true dreams or nightmares anymore, now that he was synth. But last night, rather than mere lines of code or memories, he had been privy to certain visions that were as clear as any memory in his mind as he had lain in a corner in what passed for “sleep mode” for him. Visions of what might have been if Nemo had gone too far before Hancock had found out, of losing both Lydia and Hancock in some apocalypse-level fight between them and the insane ghoul. That one had left him trembling when he’d come back to regular consciousness. When he had dared to go back into sleep mode, he’d had quite different visions of the pair, visions of lying naked between them as their hands roamed…

He simulated clearing his throat and kept driving. Listened to his companions talk about the scenery, comparing notes on their ideas for various photos and drawings. He couldn’t help but notice how close together they sat, how Hancock “accidentally” brushed the back of his hand against her braid when she wasn’t looking, how she kept turning towards him and glancing up at him with a small smile when she thought he was distracted. It was almost amusing, some parody of junior high puppy love that made Nick want to laugh and cry at the same time as he dreaded it. Dreaded Lydia getting attached to John only to have him run away from her, trying in his own fucked up way to spare her from pains he imagined her to have. Dreaded John finally deciding to maybe settle into a relationship, only to have his one attempt at an actual bond be broken by some unforeseen circumstance.

Dreaded being the third wheel, in the way. He had no doubt they’d be too polite to say anything about it. Well, maybe polite wasn’t the word, considering how he’d seen the two interact with people; neither of them was particularly prone to keeping their thoughts to themselves. But, considerate. He could tell they were attached to him enough to not want to hurt him, so he could see them trying not to hurt his feelings while really wishing he’d get out of their way for a few minutes. He resolved that maybe once they were in New Orleans again, he’d find some excuse to give them some alone time, even if it hurt him to imagine all that they might get up to without him. 

They passed the same immense turtle on their way back, sunning itself, and Lydia actually put forth the idea of attempting to pet it. She was already on the side of the boat with one hand outstretched when Hancock pulled her back. From what Nick had seen the woman was apt to pet or cuddle anything with fur, feathers, or scales, even if she shied away from most humans on instinct alone. It had been hilarious watching the settlement’s cats follow her around, watching them curl up around her when she slept rather than staying in their own houses with their “owners” at night. Hancock had surprised him, coddling the small creatures as if they were little gods and goddesses, feeding them half his food when he thought no one was looking. Nick supposed it made sense that they would love cats; the two of them were as catlike as any humans he had ever run across. The comparison was especially apt when he watched Hancock smile and arch his back, presenting his face to the sun contentedly. Oh yeah. The ghoul was a sensual creature, allright. 

They docked the small “pee-row”, as Lydia kept calling their boat, at the splintered remains of a dock where the Westek ship had been. Wordlessly, Lydia grabbed her pack and simply started walking. Hancock and Nick looked at each other, then shrugged and followed her. They supposed she must have some destination in mind.

Hancock started to feel what was coming off of her fairly quickly; he wasn’t sure if that meant his walls were thin or he was just getting that damn attached to Lydia. There was the bitter, almost metallic taste of fear and confusion, a tinge of cool curiousity, all wrapped in a layer of soft-edged despair. He smiled to himself. _I sound like some stupid pre-war wine connoisseur,_ he thought. 

Not having the benefit of being an empath, and being ever curious and forthright, Nick simply came right out and asked. “What are you thinking, Lydia?”

She glanced back at him, the colors of her eyes swirling and darkening. “It’s all gone. That’s what I’m thinking.” She pointed at a small, half crumbled brick building. “That used to be a bakery, had the best cakes in New Orleans. People used to come all the way from Vicksburg and Shreveport for those cakes, especially if they were hosting a wedding or something. When I was a kid, Old Lady Smith used to save me the day old bread and cookies; she didn’t know my father was dead exactly but she had her suspicions about why I was on the streets all the time.”

She pointed at a building across the street, this one half hidden by a collapsed wrought-iron balcony. “That was a bar, Tipsy Tina’s, and I used to go there at least once a week for Storm Riders. They had a shit ton of caffeine in them, and if you tempered it with zephyr it was one hell of a ride. Half my customers came from there, and every Mardi Gras we used to rent the balcony out to watch the parades and catch beads. I never flashed my boobs for them though. Mine were pay-per-view only.”

Nick let out a chuckle. “I never did get to come to one of those parades, but I did hit a St Patrick’s day parade once. It was wild. Men dressed like women, women dressed like men, people painting their entire bodies gold.”

She smiled as they continued their slow trek. “This city was a force of its own. Anywhere else in the country, you’d be arrested for half the shit we did on the regular. Hell, from the time the place was founded it was filled with pirates, escaped slaves, convicts and royalty. Changed hands half a dozen times before the United States was, well, united. People came here from all over the world. We had an Indian market where you could get chicken tikke on wednesdays and the best chicken makhani you ever wrapped your lips around. The cajuns that lived out in the swamps came to town to trade and party. You had a small section of town that was rich as hell, but most of the people who actually lived here? Poor, multicultural, and adventurous. People used to paint and sing and dance and make all kinds of art in Jackson Square in front of the old cathedral.” 

All of a sudden she collapsed onto the hood of a car and covered her face. Her shoulders started to shake, and Nick had a pretty good idea what was happening. She had been strong since she had woken in her tank, showing few if any signs of really understanding that her entire world was gone, and he thought that maybe now it was finally hitting her. This was the first time they’d wandered the remains of the city without some distraction or main goal in mind, and he supposed she’d simply finally had time to really see what was left.

Hancock sat next to her and tried to take her hands in his, but she had them practically welded to her face and shook her head, refusing to let go. He put one arm around her, but for once he looked awkward. He stared up at Nick, his scarred face a study in helplessness. Nick sat on her other side and put his own arm around her, leaned her toward him. To his surprise, she let go of her face long enough to grab his shirt and pull him to her, burying her face in his chest. 

“Talk to us,” Hancock rasped. 

She did, her voice broken here and there with hitching, hiccupping cries. “I...I just kept not thinking about it. And that was easy. I mean, we had enough other stuff to do, and Belle Chanson wasn’t that different from a lot of prewar cajun villages sitting on poles out in the water. They used to have a lot of people out in the swamps living on generators and what they could catch and grow, so it wasn’t...it wasn’t really that big a deal to pretend we were just, I don’t know, on vacation. And there was Nemo, and Mother Abigail, and the whole thing with the Talents, and I just...I didn’t have to think. But now that I’m back here, I can’t wish it away. I can’t just pretend it’s not happening. There’s nothing left.”

Awkwardly, Hancock rubbed at her shoulders. “Maybe we can try to rebuild some of it. I mean, maybe we can, uhm, salvage some stuff. Take it to a settlement and make sure it isn’t lost.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she moaned into Nick’s chest. He could feel the vibrations of her voice, and whereas normally that would give him uncomfortably erotic thoughts, now he was uncomfortable in an entirely different way. He had never been able to stand to see a woman cry. And this was something he had no way of fixing or making any better. 

Finally she pulled her face away and wiped at it with her tank top, then stared miserably at the flooded brick sidewalk in front of them. “I’ll never ride a motorcycle again. I’ll never street race again, looking in my rearview for cop lights with one eye and watching out for my competition with the other. I’ll never get to go to the movie theater again, or to a concert, or wander around an art supply store that hasn’t been torn down or looted or covered in dust. I’ll probably never have another Storm Rider, and I’ll never be able to go to the back room of St Peter’s Pharmacy and smell that herby smell and talk to an elder about what herbs and candles and stones to use for particular workings. The library is probably in tatters. I’ll never go to another quilting circle at the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and don’t you dare laugh at the idea of a whore quilting because I swear I’ll punch you if you do.”

She lay back on the hood and stared into the sky, then suddenly screamed “FUCK!”

Hancock and Nick looked helplessly at each other. Finally, Hancock said in his low, gravelly voice, “I was born in this world, so I can’t really imagine what it’s like for you. But there’s got to be some way you can come back from this.”

“Oh really?” She let out a short bark of a laugh, bitter and angry. “You want to know the worst part? Chairman Meow is gone. Cherry isn’t in Las Vegas making a new life for herself--she’s dead too. Or she’s a ghoul like Nemo, and no telling who she is anymore. That woman was like a sister to me, one of the only humans I actually liked. Oh, the war’s over, and that’s great. That’s just peachy fucking keen. But it’s only over because there’s nothing left to fight over anymore. And if I hadn’t been so stupid, wandering into that tank of my own free will, I would have just been vaporized with everybody else. You guys would be comfortably back in Boston doing your own thing instead of having to drag around some half dead bitch who should have died two hundred years ago.”

“Hey,” Hancock said, “I happen to like dragging around a half dead bitch. I was so bored back in the Commonwealth I thought I had died and gone to hell. If I could I’d bring your world back to life for ya, but I’d never wish you weren’t in it.”

She gave him a searching look, then grabbed his hand and kissed his knuckles. “You two are the only reason I’m not blowing my brains out right now. Because if you can keep going, I know I can.” She was silent for a moment, then let out a sigh. Nick’s processor was still stuttering over the fact that she’d included him in her reasons for living. “You know what I first thought when I saw you two? Other than thinking you were one of Westek’s experiments, like me. I saw your scars, John, and the first thing I wondered was if it hurt. And if it did, how the hell you could stand it. I’ve seen how some mornings you limp around a little before you get started good. I’ve seen how some days you take a few bandages and some antiseptic and go off by yourself somewhere, like you’re cleaning a wound and you’re either too embarrassed to let anybody know or you’re just so used to it that it’s normal to you. And yet every day, there you are, not bitching, not stopping, just putting your middle finger up at life and doing what the hell you feel like anyway.” 

The ghoul’s expression was unreadable, and Nick wondered if Hancock even knew what he was feeling about that one. Hancock cleared his throat. “Well, sometimes pieces of my skin do, erm, fall off. But,” he hurriedly added, “All the main equipment is still there. I mean, I’m missing a toe, and a nose, but for the most part it’s all still factory issue.” 

Nick wanted to laugh and cry all at the same time, and he must not have been very good at keeping a straight face at this point, because Hancock took one look at him and pointed at him with the aforementioned middle finger. “Not one word, Nick. I swear to God.” 

“And you,” she continued, looking over at Nick. “When I first met you, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of you was programming, and how much was just you. Wondered if you had a soul, or if you were just a really good facsimile of a person. Once I got to know you, turned out you were more human than most of the people I’d ever known, even prewar. You always try to do what’s right, even when it hurts. Even if nobody else would stand with you, I get the feeling you’d fight alone if you had to. If there had been somebody like you around when I was a kid…” She trailed off. 

Now it was Nick’s turn to be embarrassed, humbled and flattered, all at once. “Does it help if I tell you it does get easier? I know everybody always says that, about everything. But it’s true. You’ll never stop missing some things, like Cherry and Meow, but you will figure out a new normal. A way to go on. It took me years to figure out how to deal with it, but now I'm mostly ok.”

She held the men’s hands in her lap. Both of them had one hell of a time keeping their composure; Nick was thinking of where else his hand could roam, while Hancock was thinking of where else _her_ hand could roam. She seemed oblivious, tracing their skin with her thumbs. “It helps. I…” All of a sudden, she stopped cold, her eyes widening. She pulled Hancock’s hand up to examine it closely. He could feel his heart beating in his throat. Was she just now noticing exactly how fucked up he looked, he wondered? Was she thinking about how ugly his skin was?

“Holy fuck,” she breathed. “Hey John, you said radiation makes you feel better, heals you and makes you high, right?”

“Uh...yeah…”

“And you said you’ve never seen water this irradiated, outside of maybe the Glowing Sea, but that place was full of all kinds of dangerous animals and was kind of tore down and unlivable, right?”

“Yeeeessss….” he said slowly, not sure where she was going with this.

“How many ghouls are there, do you think? Ghouls who might be wanting to relocate?”

He smiled, starting to see her train of thought. “Enough. A lot of the humans in the ‘Wealth seem to think ghoul is catching. Think we’re all gonna go feral and try to eat them in their sleep. A lot them don’t want us living too close to them. Seems to be true everywhere else we’ve been too.”

“I think I have an idea, fellas. New Orleans has always been a haven for the outcasts. We can rebuild the city, all right. And I think a place like this, full of so much radiation your regular humans can’t really take it? Might be perfect for a colony of ghouls. Maybe a place where they can live in peace, without having to worry about the bigots all the time.”

She stood on the hood of the car and looked around, hands on her hips. Hancock appeared to be attempting to sneak a look up her skirt, even at a time like this. Nick would have smacked him one if he’d been close enough, playfully of course. 

“Gentlemen,” she said, “Maybe there is something I can do about this, after all. It’ll never be what it used to be, but hell, we’ve rebuilt this city a dozen times. Whole damn thing burned to the ground a couple of times, and it’s been flooded more times than I can count by one damn hurricane or another. We always rebuild. And we always get our culture back.”

She took a deep breath. “It may have took a little longer this time than usual, but we’re going to rebuild this bitch. My friends, welcome to the future site of Ghoul Orleans.”


	21. Chapter 21

The golden figure introduced itself to Nemo as Michael, the archangel. Coincidentally, always Nemo’s favorite angel to hear about in Bible study. It told him to give the trio a little head start, so they wouldn't see him following them quite so easily. Nemo, of course, obeyed. Who was he to question an angel? 

Besides, it gave him time to go back to his quarters and pack. In the city, he could live mainly off of the radiation in the water, eating only sparingly with no ill effects. He supposed it was one of the gifts of being a ghoul; supposed it might even be why God made him ghoul. Who better to hunt a witch, than someone who could go anywhere without dying? Food or no food, there were a few things he wanted to take with him.

Back when he had been banished from Belle Chanson for a while, when he had had to earn his way back in, he had wandered the wastes for a while. Out there he had picked up a few items and the tricks to go with them. One of those items, a horse whip he had gotten from a trader around Lafayette, had been one of his favorite weapons; lightweight, with a far reach, no need for ammo, and once he had braided pieces of razorblade into it and attached some light weight blades to the end, it had been a fairly good weapon. It wasn’t as deadly as, say, a gun, but it did do enough damage and hurt enough to buy him some time if he needed to reload or find cover. Not many people could take a licking from his whip without at least a momentary pause to catch their breath from the pain. He had once stripped half the skin from a raider’s face in two swipes, taking the woman’s left eye in the first swipe and most of her nose in the second. After that, she was fairly easy to kill--half blinded, confused, and in agony. 

Of course, he still had his faithful pistol, a shotgun, a machete, and an old captain’s coat reinforced with ballistic weave and leather panels. Michael approved his choices as he packed his bags, silently nodding and smiling, his hands clasped prayer-like to his chest and his wings folded softly. 

_Patience,_ the angel said in his mind. _The Lord, your God has purpose for you. You must not allow yourself to become distracted by the base desires of this world, but rather work for your Father’s will. I will lead you to your quarry when it is time, but first there is a great cleansing due here, in what will become the first of your Father’s temples in this new world._

Nemo cocked his head to one side and studied the angel. “Are you saying I was right about the Talents? That I must start the cleansing with the witches right here in Belle Chanson?”

The angel did not answer; instead he dissipated into thin air. But Nemo thought he understood what he was tasked with, all the same. 

And his first target? That meddling old bitch, Mother Abigail.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sappy sappy romance...

Their first order of business, of course, was to make a sweep of the city, checking on the condition of the buildings and seeing what kinds of supplies they might have. Hancock and Nick let Lydia lead, since she had been living New Orleans all her life. She turned out to have quite the knack for tearing apart old structures and furniture to harvest wood, hinges, screws, and other useful items. Their work was constantly punctuated by conversation as they called out to each other; Hancock shuttled between the two, organizing the supplies as Lydia reclaimed them from the old structures, as Nick focused on putting things together. By the end of the first couple of days they had several working generators, defense turrets, and plenty of piles of wood, bricks, and scrap metal. 

Their conversations rarely lagged, and were generally interesting, if sometimes unsettling. Nick told them about his favorite New Orleans references--King Creole, starring Elvis Presley, and A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. He recounted the plots in detail, including whole lines of dialogue, for Hancock and Lydia as they worked. Lydia recalled her short time with a pimp, Sawyer, and how he had locked his girls in their rooms at the end of their shifts. That was when she had figured out how to use a screwdriver to push the pins out of the door hinges, so that she could escape. After that, she taught them several Robert Johnson songs she'd learned by heart. Hancock told them the plots of several Shakespeare plays and Raymond Chandler novels, going so far as to use different voices for different characters. 

None of them had had such fun in their entire lives. If a few months ago someone had told Hancock he would have thought settlement building was amusing, he would have laughed at them. But somehow, with Nick and Lydia at his side, _everything_ was more entertaining. 

As they cleared one block at a time, Lydia started building floating platforms, saying that the only way to make this city stable was to just plan it to float from the beginning onwards. She told them histories of multiple floods, levee failures, hurricanes, and by the end of that Nick had to wonder about the wisdom of building in this location at all--but he kept his doubts to himself. She needed a mission to keep going, and hell, while he was thinking about it, so did he and John. He supposed this was as good a mission as any. Besides, if the location was less than desirable, well, that might just give their future ghoul population more security from bigoted humans and raiders. Besides, all this work was doing both of his companions a lot of good. Whether it was from the work giving him an appetite or from the muscle building qualities of all the fetching and transporting he was doing, Hancock was actually putting a little weight back on, looking more like his usual lean but finely muscled self. And with the constant bathing in radiation, his skin was picking up a soft blue glow when the sun went down. Lydia commented on their third day in the city that she hadn’t seen Hancock making his trips to be alone with medical supplies, and he had answered that his skin was more whole and comfortable than it had been in a while. 

As for Lydia, she was apparently intent on working herself to exhaustion every day, then falling into a more natural sleep near midnight. Hancock’s slow weaning program for getting her back down to more manageable levels of zephyr was working like a charm, and if she was having any withdrawals or side effects she was burying them in her mission. Nick couldn’t help but notice that Hancock wasn’t going through the Jet as fast as he would have ordinarily. Not that he said anything about that to them, either. They were grownups, and able to think for themselves--letting them know how closely he was watching them, worrying over them, would probably just make them feel creeped out or pissed off. Years of detective work had given Nick a finely honed sense of discretion.

Near the end of their first week, Lydia called Nick over to her. She was seated cross legged on an old wooden crate, strands of hair hanging around her face where the wind had blown them throughout the day, those incredible eyes trained on a copper wand. The tip had a bundle of fine wires nested on it, and the end she held was wrapped in electrical tape. Using electrical tape and more wiring, she had made a cord for the device that led back to the miniature, portable generator she had taken to using to light her drawing table after dark. Several makeshift switches and what he could swear were computer chips lined the back of it, and it was plugged in on the other side to a computer she had scavenged from the liquor store down the street. Nick tried to ignore the pale, taut flesh of her thighs peering out from under her leather skirt, the way he could see down her shirt if he leaned over just a little bit more. He felt his internal fans speed up a little, keeping his system cool. 

“Hey Nicky, do you trust me?” She looked up at him, her expression something between mischief and eagerness.

“Well, ordinarily I’d say yes, but that question usually comes before somebody asks you to do something you don’t want to do or something weird. What are you working on, doll?”

“Well...you know how your system is a little different from mine and Hancock’s. More, uhm, perceptive of electrical current?”

“Yeah.”

“I have something I want to test. It won’t hurt.”

He smiled at her. “And what is the function of this device?”

“Oh, you’ll find out if it works.”

Nick took a seat next to her. “All right, I guess I’m game. But if you short circuit me, you’re going to be the one to have to explain to Hancock why all of a sudden all my speech is backwards and I keep calling him Fraulein.”

“Deal. Roll your shirt sleeve up.”

Nick took his coat off and laid it to the side on top of a nearby shelf. He rolled his sleeve up with a slight grimace, thinking that he’d rather her not see how dirty and scarred his arm was. She grasped his wrist, the one with the exposed metal, gently and laid his hand, palm up, on her knee. She looked into his eyes and he could swear that his mouth went dry, all the simulated saliva his body produced to allow for speech suddenly evaporated. She held the nest of wires an inch or so above the exposed metal of his inner wrist, and he could feel the soft tingle of electricity. Slowly, watching him closely, she brought the wand closer to him, and that tingle turned into a soft tickling massage that ran from the tips of his fingers to his inner elbow. He felt like tiny fingers were caressing his entire inner arm, and if he still had hairs on the back of his neck, they would have been standing straight up. He couldn’t help but two notice two things simultaneously: he had a sudden, viciously throbbing erection, and he had let out an embarrassing low groan. 

Immediately Lydia jerked the wand away from his skin, looking panicked. “It wasn’t supposed to hurt! I had it set for the lowest current I could get. Did it hurt?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Don’t worry, Doll. I’m all right.”

“But you moaned! Did it itch? Burn? What happened?”

“That...ah…” He began to stutter. “That wasn’t a moan of pain. It was, ah…”

Her expression lightened, her eyes suddenly wide. She got it. “Oh! Oh...I’m...uhm, I’m sorry if I made things...uncomfortable for you. It’s just, I wasn’t sure how your sensors worked, or how much sensory information you could pick up, and I figured, you know how good a massage is after a long day of working, and I knew since you don’t have muscles I couldn’t, say, rub your shoulders, I mean, I could, but it wouldn’t be the same, and I…”

She stopped, at a loss for words. Nick found himself staring at her, his fingers aching to reach out to her. She had been trying to figure out a way to bring comfort to him? The broken down pile of junk in their group? But he had thought she was catching feelings for Hancock, not him. Surely he had to be…

“Just kiss him already,” a gruff voice rasped from the other side of the room. Hancock, having caught half of the conversation on his way in, leaned against the wall. When they turned to look at him, he cocked one corner of his hat at them in greeting. “‘M serious. I’ve seen the way you look at him. And hell, I don’t blame you.”

Flustered, Nick pulled his hand back and started rolling his sleeve down. “If she’s been looking at anybody it’s been you and you know it, you charismatic bastard,” he grumbled, unwilling to even consider the possibilities Hancock’s comment had opened up. There was no way he could ever be that lucky…

“Time out,” she said. The two turned to look at her. “You’re both right, if you must know.” A pale flush had crept into her cheeks. 

Silently, they gaped at her. 

She shrugged. “What can I say? Both of you grow on a woman.”

Nick opened his mouth several times, but no words would come. Hancock gently pushed his chin up with two scarred fingers. “You’re gonna draw flies, Nicky,” he muttered. To Lydia, he said, “I don’t blame you for falling for Nick. I’ve been in love with the stubborn bastard for years, but I just figured he don’t like men that way. Or maybe he don’t like anybody that way. But me...you don’t want to wake up to this every morning. Hell, I don’t even want to wake up to this every morning. It’s grotesque.”

She glared at Hancock. “I’ve met lots of people I’d call grotesque, John, but you’re not one of them. I ain’t going to lie to you. I respect you too much for that. When I first met you, I didn’t care what you look like one way or the other. But like I said...you grew on me. And the more I got to know you, the more I came to appreciate you.” She approached the men gingerly, slowly, as if she was afraid they might run from her if she came at them too fast.

Gently, she grasped the two by the chin and looked from one to the other, licking her lips. As she ran one thumb over his lips, Nick closed his eyes and leaned into her touch, unable to help himself. 

“Let me tell you boys what I see when I look at you. Detective, I wonder if they modeled your synth face after your real one. Slightly thin pouty lips with a soft overbite, couple of laugh lines, couple of frown lines. Strong chin and cheekbones, a face that wouldn’t be out of place sculpted in marble in a museum. And your eyes…”

The eyes in mention fluttered open in surprise. She smiled gently at him. 

“At first they startled me. Especially in the dark. But now, every time I see that soft amber glow, it’s a comfort, because I know who’s behind it. I know they belong to a man of honor. I know that glow means you’re nearby, and that means somebody I trust has my back.”

“Don’t forget his voice,” Hancock mumbled from beside him. “And that dry sense of humor. I could listen to him wise cracking all day.”

This turned her attention to the ghoul, who was rubbing his face against her other hand, looking for all the world like a cat begging to be petted. “And you, Mr Mayor. I’m guessing all you see in the mirror is scars.” She traced the prominent veins over his forehead. “I see rivers and streams just underneath your skin. Hills and valleys, patterns of stripes and whirls that remind me of a tiger’s fur. Eyes that can be hard chunks of onyx when you’re pissed off, or mirrored pools of tar when you’re calm. I see a man who has survived the unsurvivable. A man who uses his wits and his humor and his need for adventure to make it through a life that many people probably wouldn’t have made it through.”

Nick gazed upon her in wonder, and confusion. “You mean to tell me, you’re in love with both of us?”

“Why not? You can love more than one person at a time. Especially when they’re as extraordinary as you two.”

“You know you don’t have to, right,” Nick asked. “I mean, you don’t have to pretend…”

She laughed. “I don’t have to pay for your company by fucking you? Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Well, I, ah…”

“Nicholas J Edgar Hoover Valentine,” she said in exasperation. “I’ve never lied to a person about my feelings. If it’s a pity fuck, or a payment fuck, or a guilt fuck, trust me, I’ll tell you up front. If you had any idea how long I’ve wanted to get my hands on you...the both of you…”

She grabbed Nick by the collar and pulled him to her, pressing her lips gently against his. He could smell her this close, a mix of her perfume oil, castille soap, and something underneath that, something primal, and he realized it was the smell of a turned on woman. It was a heady mix, and before he was aware of it his mind had gone blank, all thoughts washed away in the sensation of her hands on him, her tongue in his mouth, his hands sliding into her hair as he almost subconsciously untied the ribbon she’d used to tie off her braid. Her hair was silky around his fingers, almost as soft as cat’s fur. Softly, tentatively, he felt another set of hands on him, rough scarred fingers that could only be Hancock’s, sliding against his chest as the ghoul started unbuttoning his shirt for him. Hancock's skin was warm, and felt like fine leather. 

Part of him screamed at him that this had to be wrong, that he shouldn’t let the pair throw their lives away on him, that this had to be a hallucination or fever dream of some kind. But the biggest part of him couldn’t listen to that, in fact screamed back at that inner voice to shut the fuck up, because it had been too long since he had been touched, and even longer since that touch had been one he actually desired. It had been too many days and nights of letting his eyes feast on his companions when they weren’t looking, thinking that there was no way he would ever have them but at least he could look. Too many times he had run diagnostics in a vain attempt to abort any feelings he might be developing for them, to wash away the fantasies he kept having, and as Lydia groaned against his lips and pressed herself close enough to him that she might as well be trying to climb inside his skin, as she pressed one thigh against his throbbing erection and sent a wave of pleasure surging through him at the contact, any attempt at self control was blasted into nothingness. 

Hancock, for his part, was like a starving man at a buffet, not sure where to put his hands and lips next. He watched them as he groped at them, noticed how both of them--Nick included--arched into his hands, seemed to want him to keep going. He laid a trail of kisses along Lydia’s shoulder, slid his fingers over Nick’s chest as he unbuttoned the synth’s shirt, pressed his crotch against Lydia’s hip as he nuzzled at Nick’s inner wrist and licked the exposed metal above his torn hand. 

It was at that moment that the bullet punched through a cracked window and into Hancock’s side.


	23. Chapter 23

Nemo knew that Mother Abigail would be easy to break. Her thin bones were covered in crepe-paper skin and the barest hint of fat; he could have broken her bird-like wrists in one twist. But he also knew that she was likely to cry out as soon as she knew what he was up to, and the old bitch knew more than he was strictly comfortable with. She was the only one who had been around when he had been exiled from Belle Chanson, and he had his suspicions that if she didn’t know he had something to do with killing witch brats all those years ago, she probably had ideas. As old as she was, he wouldn’t be surprised if her powers had grown, if she could read his mind.

So he waited until she was asleep to mount his attack. The day dragged by in a parody of normality. At first he was polite to everyone, if a little distant, but after the third time he’d gotten a questioning look from one of the settlers he realized that his politeness in and of itself was abnormal for him. So he spent the rest of the day in his shack, sharpening his knives, rechecking his go-bag, and planning.

After the last lantern in the settlement had been turned down, he began his work. He crept to Mother Abigail’s home first, a small simple shack at water level. It was easier on the old woman not to have to climb all those stairs; interestingly enough, it was easier on Nemo to get her alone there as well. Most of the settlers liked to live above the water line, to avoid any flooding. Abigail lay in her hammock, the soft light of a lantern on low burnishing her wrinkled skin, her grey hair pillowing her head. Nemo closed the door gently behind him, making sure to wait for the click of the latch, and crept to her hammock side. She looked peaceful in this light, a slight smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. 

He almost didn’t want to do it. Surely she would die on her own before too much longer; she wasn’t a ghoul like him. But he knew that as soon as he disappeared from the settlement, it was very likely that she would send someone after him, that she would guess his plans and his destination. And he couldn’t have that. In one smooth motion, he clamped his hand over her face, shoving her chin up with the heel of his hand while his fingers pinched her nostrils closed. Her eyes flew open immediately, her pupils huge with fear. She beat at him with her small, thin hands, but the blows were useless; her age and his closeness worked against her. He felt his lips pull back from his teeth, but whether he was grinning or snarling even he couldn’t tell. What he _could_ tell was that he was getting hard as a rock. He presumed it must be God’s own reward for him finally getting around to doing the Lord’s work. 

Even after she stopped struggling, even after her eyes became fixed on the ceiling, he continued to hold her there for long moments. He wouldn’t put it past her to pretend to be dead just long enough to get him to let his guard down. Gently he pulled his hand away from her face. He licked the inside of his wrist and held it over her gaping mouth, waiting for the slightest breath to touch his skin. After a while, when none came, he closed her eyelids for her and turned out her lantern. He carried her bridal style to the edge of the dock beside her home, and slid her gently into the water, feet first. He made sure to turn her face down before leaving her there. The others would find her in the morning, he was sure, but in the meantime the water could get a start on cleansing the evil from her body. Maybe if she was lucky, it would wash her soul as well, so that God Himself might have mercy on her. 

His next stop was the home of the mother and daughter that made water contort to their will. Creeping into their home turned out to be as easy as creeping into Mother Abigail’s had been; no one in Belle Chanson locked their doors. _Too much easy living,_ he thought. _Idiots._ He went after the child first; might as well go for the easy one. The little girl lay on a pallet on the floor, her mattress made of spanish moss. She held a doll in one small arm, stuffed with moss and with moss for hair. The thing looked up at him with one button eye, the other lost long ago. The child had her thumb in her mouth, and he was almost touched. He had never had any children of his own, but he was hardly a monster. He could see the inherent beauty, the innocence, in them. He doubted the child really knew what her abilities meant, in the grand scheme of things. Doubted she meant any harm. 

But that’s precisely why he had killed the others while they were still children. If he killed her now, while she was still innocent, she would go straight to his Father’s side in heaven, for she had not yet reached the age of reason at which she could be expected to choose her actions wisely. He would kill her as he had the others, then baptize her in the waters and leave her there to float peacefully, just like before. He knelt next to her softly, smiling gently. He was saving her, really. If she grew up, she would doubtlessly still turn to her “Talents”, only she’d be old enough to know better. Old enough to be condemned to hell for it. 

Swiftly, before his human weakness could take hold, he moved in for the kill, holding his hand against the child’s face. She began to thrash and make some moaning noises, but he held his other hand against her throat and dug into her vocal chords, and that stopped quickly enough. The child clawed at his hands, her fingernails digging deep, and he had to press his lips together to hold back the hiss of pain he wanted to let out.

Suddenly, a blade was sliding into his shoulder. The girl’s mother, having apparently sensed that something was wrong, had come to check on her daughter, and she was screaming like a banshee, clinging to his back like a spider monkey. The girl too had caught her breath and begun to scream, and then her father was there, a pistol in each hand. A bullet caught the wall just behind him, and Nemo spun, trying to keep the wife between himself and the girl’s father. The little girl, for her part, had gone from terror to rage, and now she too was clinging to him, sinking her teeth into his leg over and over again. He spun from side to side, trying to shake the women, as another bullet flew, this one travelling straight through the palm of his hand before lodging itself into the wall a few inches from its predecessor. He managed to shake the child off, flinging her into the corner. The woman continued to cling, to punch and claw and scream, and he would have sworn that her voice itself was a weapon, drilling through his ear drum and straight into his brain. 

He turned toward the wall and slammed the mother against it, once, twice, three times, before she was finally dislodged. She lay on the floor beside her daughter, dazed. The man had continued to shoot at him; a bullet nicked his cheek, another went through the same shoulder he had been stabbed in, and yet another passed mere centimeters from his head. Behind the man, a golden glow traveled from the front room toward them; the archangel. Michael stared at Nemo sadly, his blue eyes large and luminous in the dark. 

_You must make sure you live to get Lydia,_ the angel said in his head. _She awakens the others. A witch who can spread the seed of her evil is more of a threat than one that can simply shape water. You can come back with a sniper rifle, kill these from a pirogue. You have to get the head witch._

Nemo did not question the apparition. He ran directly at the man, who was still shooting at him, catching him by surprise. He plowed into the father, his head butting into the man’s stomach and shoving the air from his body. Nemo didn’t wait to see the results of his work; he ran as best he could to the security dock and took one of the small, flat-bottomed aluminum boats. He had already left his backpack beside one of the tie-off posts, and he grabbed at it with one shaking hand before pushing himself away from the dock with his paddle. He was tempted to start the outboard motor, but he knew that this would be inviting disaster; it would immediately wake up the rest of the settlement, for one thing. For another, in the darkness, it would be all too easy to plow his boat straight into a cypress knee or to run aground on a particularly large mudbar. He watched lanterns turn on above him one by one, listened as settlers began to yell for help, but so far all their efforts seemed to be focused on running to the house he had attacked, trying to come to the rescue of the family. Nemo smiled. This would give him some time, even if only moments. He had been through these marshes many times, and knew routes that his security team had never seen. He even knew somewhat of a shortcut to New Orleans, and he would bet his bottom dollar that’s where the whore had gone. And although every stroke of his paddle made the pain in his shoulder flare and throb, made blood run sticky down his side, he knew that once he got to the city the radiation would heal him.

He would catch up to the bitch and her companions. All it took was a little patience, and the Lord on his side.


	24. Chapter 24

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Lydia tore the remnants of a curtain from the pile of junk they’d amassed and held it against Hancock’s side to try to stem the flow of blood.

At first Lydia and Nick were in shock, unsure what the sound, what Hancock’s sudden fall, meant. But it didn’t take long for them to see the blood blossoming on his coat, pattering to the floor in a deluge. She grabbed Nick’s hands and pressed them to the makeshift bandage. 

“Hold pressure on it, keep him warm, keep him alive,” she told him. “Do not leave his side, no matter what you hear.” 

And just like that, she was gone. 

Nick was torn. He knew that someone--maybe more than one someone--was out there with a gun, just waiting for Lydia to come charging out. But he also knew that if he let up on the cloth, John might very well bleed to death. And Lydia had seemed confident enough when she had given him his marching orders and promptly left. He remembered what Hancock had told her when they had barely met; _turns out the reason you’re not packing heat, is you are the heat_. 

It didn’t help matters that the ghoul in question was currently wriggling around, trying his damnedest to get up. 

“Stop that,” Nick told him. “You’re going to bleed to death if I don’t keep this pressure on!”

“And you’re...letting our woman...go out to...battle alone,” John said back, but even in the midst of emergency Nick could hear how breathless he was, how he had to pause to gasp for air between words. How each gasp ended with a wheeze, with fresh flecks of blood rimming his thin lips. He was no doctor, but Nick would bet the bullet had lodged itself in the younger man’s lung. “The radiation...will heal...me anyway. Tie...my belt...around the bandage...and...let’s go.”

“Then it will heal Lydia too. Trust her. She knows what she’s doing.” Nick prayed this was true as he tried to drag his companion towards the irradiated water and keep pressure on his wound at the same time.  
*********  
Lydia was past rational thought. She was a creature of pure instinct and fury now, lost in sensation and impulse. Energy streamed into her body through her left hand, pulsing in her core, waiting for her to release it. She pulled every ounce of heat from the area around her and into herself, so much so that as she put each foot down the water beneath her turned to ice. She could feel her right hand heating up, throbbing in time with her heartbeat, which had revved into overdrive. Could feel the energy flowing through her brain, her cunt, her legs. Although the day was clear of clouds or storm, lightning suddenly flashed, and as soon as it was there she was diverting the electricity into herself as well. She walked steadily towards where the gunshot had come from, past caring if she was shot at. 

In the back of her mind, she kept seeing it over and over: John’s face, his eyes shocked wide, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly for long moments as the blood that kept him alive fell from him in thick ropes. She had an idea who might be to blame, but blame didn’t matter much at this point either; what mattered was taking out the threat. She smelled ozone, felt her hair standing on end with the electricity pulsing through her, and the hot stinging in her brain let her know that was going to pay for this later, and pay dearly. 

A bullet passed beside her head, and another. The flame in her palm was at as big as a baseball and growing as she kept walking toward the source of the shots. A bullet ran through the palm of her left hand, and she felt the metal of it melt, felt her veins pull it into herself. The pain was immediate, hot and prickly, but she had felt a lot of pain in her life, and this high she was on made it seem far away, unimportant.

And she was high as hell. She had forgotten how really letting loose felt. How she could teeter on the edge of self destruction for long moments, ramping the energy in her body up and up until it was almost enough to tear her apart cell by cell. She saw a face peer out from behind a car across the street from where she and her companions had been, and sure enough, the face belonged to Nemo. He looked almost desperate, reloading before sending another bullet flying at her, this one punching through the side of her thigh. That bullet, too, was melted and pulled into her flesh, more fodder for the magick she was about to sling. The next time he peered out from behind the car she was mere feet away from him; she flung the ball of flame in her palm at him, listened to his sudden high-pitched shriek with a satisfaction that went deeper than any she’d had in a long, long time. Maybe it was the thwarted desire in her, but the sound of his suffering was like a caress against her deepest parts, and she shivered. 

“Father God and Archangel Michael help me now,” Nemo shrieked, and as she sounded the car he’d been using for cover she smiled.

But her smile was short lived. As fast as the flesh was melting from his face and shoulder with the heat from her flame, it was growing back, knitting itself together. _The damned water,_ she thought. All the radiation. That could help John, but it was also helping Nemo. Meanwhile her own bullet holes were staying hellishly open, throbbing in time with her heartbeat, with the magick she was cycling through her system. 

She grabbed the barrel of his gun, a sniper rifle, and the heat of her hand began to melt the metal. Streams of molten iron traveled over his hand and he squealed, trying to pull away. 

“Let me help you with that,” she said, and tore the gun away from him, tossing it behind her. He howled loud enough to cover the crack of broken bone as his fingers were twisted backwards, the flesh pulling away with the hot metal of the gun. 

Even in the midst of his pain, he was still dangerous, however. He wasn’t quite as used to pain as Lydia was, didn’t have the gift of going berserker like Odin had given her, but he had been ghoul for many decades. He had been forced to learn how to keep going even when his joints screamed and his skin fell off in strips, and now he was able to keep enough of his wits about him to reach for the knife in his belt. She crouched on the hood of the car in front of him, one hand around his throat pulling the life from him, mixing his energy with her own and using it to form her flames. With the other hand she punched him repeatedly, in the side of the head, in the nose, in the shoulder that had only recently healed from his last fight. With a strength born of pure adrenaline, he slammed his knife through her foot and into the metal of the car beneath her, pinning her to the hood. She let him go and fell backwards, but was eerily silent, refusing to voice the pain that was cascading through her system. She worked at the knife, but for long moments it was stuck in the rusted metal. Finally she pulled it through just enough to get loose from the car, and, blade still jutting from her flesh and boot, she splashed down in front of him.

She grabbed at him, and for one confused moment he thought she was going for his crotch. But then her flame-wrapped hand was clenching at his thigh muscles, burning through flesh and tendon, burning down to bone in mere seconds. She grinned at him.

“Thanks for the idea, Nemo,” she said. “I guess I don’t have to kill you, do I? Probably can’t as long as we’re in all this damn radiation. All I have to do is lame you enough to make you useless.”

Ice water ran through his veins at the thought as she burned through the bone of his thigh and kept going. The radiation was indeed trying to heal him as fast as he was injured, but as the cells reached out towards where their mates should have been, as they tried to find a way to bridge the gap and found it impossible, his body started healing in another way; his flesh began to knit together into a stump. If his body couldn’t stop the loss of his leg, it would form a scar to keep him from bleeding to death.

He struggled against her, punching at her again and again. He had foolishly left his bag back at his boat, thinking the sniper rifle would be enough, thinking that he would have enough time to sit behind the car and pick them off one by one. And if that didn’t do it, he always had his knife. He had known the radiation would continuously heal him as they fought, but he hadn’t counted on her rage, on her quick thinking or on his own shitty luck. 

Through with one leg, she continued to the next, dodging Nemo’s weakening punches as best she could but still taking more than she avoided. She could feel herself losing power as well, could feel the strain that keeping this flame up was putting on her body. She would swear she could feel her body beginning to scavenge her fat to burn for energy, and she knew she had to finish this soon. She was through the bone of his second thigh, most of the way through the flesh, when the flames dimmed and gave way, any fuel she could pull from her environment exhausted. She panted harshly, her skin paler than usual with the effort, and the pain was beginning to become insistent, was beginning to actually affect her. Odin had given her the gift of being a berserker, of being able to ignore massive amounts of pain and damage for a while so she could continue to fight, but even this gift didn’t make her invulnerable, and she was tiring. Nemo was continuing to try to punch at her, but weakly, his eyes fluttering between hits; she suspected he was going into shock. She pulled at the knife that was still stuck in her foot, gritting her teeth against the hot lance of agony that traveled up to her knee as she had to wiggle the knife to get it out, but as soon as it was free she hacked at what was left of the flesh holding Nemo’s leg to his body, then tossed the limb away from him. She poured the radioactive water--still cold but no longer solid ice--over his wound and watched the scar tissue form. 

She fell back from him onto her ass in the water, watching him closely for a moment. She suspected he wasn’t going anywhere any time soon; he lay back, his top half resting against a defunct street lamp, staring into the sky. His pupils were blown wide, his hands trembling. She looked carefully around for any signs of other weapons or bags, but she saw nothing. She wanted to carry him back to her companions so she could keep an eye on him, wanted to run back to Hancock, but every muscle quivered and felt weak. She was going to crash soon, and when she did Nick would have two invalids on his hands for a little while. She had to get back to Hancock before that happened. 

She crawled through the water towards her companions, hoping Nick had been able to keep Hancock from bleeding out. She fought against the darkness creeping at the edge of her vision for as long as she could, but sooner than she would have liked, she was sinking.


	25. Chapter 25

“We can only do this if we get organized,” Nick said. “I’ll keep holding this down. You try to get your belt off, but try to move around as little as you can.” 

Hancock looked up at him, those big black eyes filled with trust even now when he may very well be dying, and Nick felt a pang of regret. John’s feelings for him had been more than a passing whim it appeared, had been more than just curiosity and had been there longer than Nick had suspected. And he had pushed the younger man away, too wrapped up in hating himself to accept the gift that kept presenting itself, patiently.

And now, just when he had realized that John wanted him, that Lydia wanted him, it looked like John might be lost to them. Nick felt himself grinding his teeth, an old habit left over from human Nick, and tried to focus on the mission at hand. There was no way he was letting John go without a hell of a fight, and if he could just get him into that radioactive water, water that was merely yards away, he could save him. 

John got the flag untied, got it slid out of the belt loops on his trousers. “Under...other circumstances...this would be….exciting,” he panted, his voice weak between gasps for breath, and Nick smiled in spite of himself. 

“You’re going to have to save the excitement for another day, Smartass. Right now let’s just focus on keeping you alive to see that other day, okay?”

John nodded, wincing as Nick helped him sit up. He directed John to keep the bandage in place while he wrapped the flag around his torso and used it to tie the bandage down. Even if the water healed the damage, if he lost too much blood, Nick knew, it wouldn’t matter. He muttered an apology as he tied it tight; he knew it had to be agony for John, but the ghoul simply nodded and reached for Nick.

“Help...me up...Nicky. Gotta...go...quick.”

Nick did better than that. He picked the ghoul up, one arm under his knees and the other behind his back, and carried him to the water. He could hear gunshots outside, but so far none of the bullets seemed to be travelling their way. If Nick had been on personal terms with a god he would have been praying by now; instead he found himself praying to Lydia's god to keep her safe. He eased John into the swampy water and watched as the ghoul leaned back and closed his eyes. His breaths were still short and gasping, but a small smile was forming on his face. The blood seeping down his side from under the bandage slowed, then stopped. The ghoul's body loosened, and Nick hoped that meant that his pain was easing. Nick tried to look for Lydia, and spotted her on the hood of a car, punching furiously at something that was hidden from his view. Then he saw a flash of light on metal. With horror he watched her pull at a knife in her boot, then leap behind the car. Greenish light flickered behind the car, and Nick suspected Lydia was using those flames of hers back there.

Hancock crabbed his way up using Nick’s leg as a crutch and began to hobble toward the car. Nick pulled his pistol, John pulled his knife, and the two made their way toward the site of the fight. A howl, inhumanly loud, arose from the area, and they thought they could make out Lydia’s smooth voice underlying it, but neither of them could make out the words. 

Dizzy from blood loss, dizzy from the effort it took just to breathe, Hancock fell twice, and twice Nick helped him up, tried to get him to stay behind, but it was useless. The ghoul merely shook his head and kept going. Suddenly all went silent, and the green glow winked out of existence. 

From behind the car, they heard breathing, hard and shallow, and muted splashing. Nick gestured for Hancock to wait for him as he crept toward the sound. What he saw made him let out an involuntary cry.

Nemo lay across from him, quivering in shock, sitting still and quiet. Lydia lay face down in the water, her hair floating around her. Nick grabbed her, pulling her face out of the water. Immediately she started breathing again, and he let out a sigh of relief. 

“What the hell’s going on over there,” Hancock called. 

Nick carried Lydia out from behind the car and listened to Hancock invent new cursewords. He looked between Lydia’s pallid face and Hancock’s blood stained side. It was another one of those times when it would have been a relief to be able to cry.


	26. Chapter 26

She woke in a world of discomforts. She was ravenous, for one thing. Shivering and freezing half to death for another. She expected the headache, a soft pounding across the front of her head from side to side, such that she could feel the blood pulsing through her veins. But honestly, she’d expected it to be worse. The headaches she remembered from before her time at Westek had been migraine-level, blinding, deafening in their intensity. This was certainly distracting, but bearable. She found herself nestled in Nick’s lap with his overcoat thrown over her, warmth leaching from him into herself steadily; she realized that she had, unconsciously, been pulling energy from him. She could feel his electricity moving through her, soothing her. She attempted to get away from him before she wound up doing some damage, but he held her closer, his casing surprisingly pliant and comfortable. 

“Relax, Doll. We’re going to make it.”

She wanted to try to push away from him again, to stop leeching off of him, but she just felt so damn tired. “I need to get away from you,” she said. “I think I’m draining you.”

He laughed. “I’ve noticed. Don’t worry, they built me to last. Back when I was handyman of Diamond City, I accidentally electrocuted myself trying to repair some wiring. Back when it was new to me. Would have killed a regular man, but wound up recharging my fusion cores and putting a little pep in my step for the next week. They also built my system to use alcohol as a combustion source, and it can compost food and use the methane released by the bacteria they colonized me with as a source of natural gas. I’m not going to run out of juice any time soon.”

“I still shouldn’t be trying to parasite off of you,” she said.

“Considering you took a few bullets and a knife trying to protect me and John from that scumbag, I’m not sure I’d call it a parasite thing. More like...what’s that word John? When you were telling me about the moss and the trees back in Tennessee?”

“Symbiosis,” the ghoul muttered. He was pouring salt into a pot of steaming water. His knife was soaking in it. Lydia had a bad feeling about this.

“The radiation. Did it heal you,” she asked.

“Mostly. I think I...have a bullet...still inside. My lung. Nick...thinks we...need a doctor...to remove it.”

“Then let’s go. Nobody in Belle Chanson would have that kind of skill, but that asshole Nemo had mentioned that he goes up toward Lafayette and Baton Rouge to trade. I bet they might have a doctor there, if the caravans stop there all the time. Hell, from what I remember, if the rivers hadn’t changed course we ought to be able to take the boat all the way to Baton Rouge. That’s one of the ways Sawyer had us move chems back in the day. Kept the cops off our trail easier than if we took the freeway.”

“Law enforcement must have had their hands full around here,” Nick muttered.

“Sounds…like a plan…” Hancock wheezed. “But first...we gotta...get you healed up.”

"How come it didn't heal you," Nick asked. 

Lydia shrugged. "The normal ghouls have to heal constantly or else they'll die, I think. With the skin damage and the joint damage and all. Maybe all that Radaway that helped me keep the whole smoothskin look also made sure my body never had to adapt to all that cellular damage. My body never learned a skill it didn't think it needed." Lydia watched Hancock lay a line of stimpacks out on a towel in front of him. 

Nick simulated clearing his throat. “I’m going to have to apologize to you for what’s about to go down,” he said. “You were in that water with god knows what long enough, if we just stimpack you without cleaning it, no telling what kind of infection you’ll pick up.’

Wordlessly, Hancock handed her a bottle of Buffout. She took a look, noticed there were only four pills left, and handed it back to him. “You’re the one with a bullet still lodged in you. You’ll need this more than I will.”

“You might...not...be saying that...in a minute...when I’m...soaking that hand...in salt water.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Unless you know of a Buffout factory between here and Baton Rouge, I ain’t taking that away from you. My pain will be intense but brief. But you got miles to go before we can get you the help you need.”

He grimaced, but put the bottle down. She noticed he didn’t put it too far from him, though, just in case she changed her mind. 

She started talking, mainly to keep her mind off of what he was doing, as he took his knife from the pot of hot salt water and started gently tugging at the blood clot in the bullet wound in her palm. She tried to keep her voice steady, but the two men could both hear the sharp little gasps, the subtle tremors between words.

“Back before the war, they used to have these ads for stimpacks. Used to have disclaimers at the bottom.”

“I remember that,” Nick said. “Used to say, see your doctor within 24 hours of incident. Stimpack is not meant as a replacement for medical attention.”

“I knew this girl once, Daphne. She worked for Sawyer about the same time as I did. So one night--son of a bitch!” She couldn’t help but to cry out as Hancock submerged her shot palm into the water; the pain was immediate, burning, and all consuming. She could feel the throbbing heat all the way up to her elbow. Hancock’s expression was grim, and Nick could swear he heard the ghoul grinding his teeth as he gently moved her hand through the water, making sure to get the solution through as much of the torn tissue as he could.

He pulled the offending limb up a little and waited for the bloody water to drain. The room smelled of copper. Gently, with a precision Lydia wouldn’t have believed before, John slid a stimpack needle into the tissue above the wound and pressed the plunger. The medicine went to work quickly, numbing the nerves as it provided proteins, amino acids and collagen to the wound bed. She watched the bullet hole begin knitting itself together with awe. 

“That gets me every time,” she said. “It’s like a miracle.”

As the healing slowed down, what had been a bullet wound that had gone through both sides of her palm became a shallow abrasion on each side. It would take a couple of days to fully heal, but no more than that. 

“See...if you can...move it...like you could...before,” Hancock rasped. 

She clenched and unclenched her fingers, wiggled them, and smiled at him. “A little stiff, but nothing time won’t cure. I almost didn’t even feel the needle. How’d you do that?”

He gave out a little chuff of laughter. “I’m a junkie. ‘Ve had a lot of practice.”

She glanced down at her thigh. The skin was unblemished where another bullet had grazed her. “You already took care of that I see.”

“Wish you could...sleep through...the rest of this....like you did...through that. Now comes...the other...hard part.”

He unlaced her boot, the one that Nemo had stabbed through, slowly. He stared down at her leg, at the subtle curves and the pale smooth skin; Nick watched him lick his lips and realized the ghoul was having as much trouble staying focused as he was. Nick shifted subtly, trying to keep his growing erection from making itself obvious to her. In spite of what Nemo had interrupted--another good reason to kick Nemo’s ass again later--this was probably not the time. 

Nick had no way of knowing that, pain or no pain, Lydia’s mind was beginning to travel down similar paths. With that bullet still lodged in his lung, Lydia knew Hancock had to be hurting, but here he was, looking at her like a man having a religious experience. He looked up at her, almost shyly, and pressed his ruined lips to the side of her ankle. Her skin tasted of the leather from her boot, a subtle tang of salty sweat and slight chemical zing of the adrenaline that only an hour before had been singing through her veins. He looked up at her, gauging her reaction, watching her chest rise and fall as her breathing quickened. Her eyes, luminous in the shadows of dusk, were locked on him. He pulled the boot the rest of the way off and, unable to help himself, let himself have the smallest taste of her blood. His stomach rumbled loud enough that he knew they had to have heard it, his hunger sharpening with the taste of her. It was rich, a taste that was somehow deep, meaty but with a hint that was almost like an aged red wine. 

He immediately sat back up, grateful for the umpteenth time that his blush wouldn’t show through on his scarred face. The day had been long, confusing, and filled with pain for all of them. He expected to look up and see disgust on their faces, to hear Lydia chastise him, or to hear Valentine let out a little “eww.” He tried to prepare himself for them to ask what he had been thinking since he'd found out about his little fetish... _What's wrong with you?_

Instead, when he got his nerve up to look at them, he saw Lydia pulling Valentine’s hand to her breast. The synth looked surprised, but that was quickly replaced by desire. She was smiling at Hancock, one eyebrow cocked. 

“So even sane ghouls have a taste for flesh,” she said. “Go ahead, John. If you need my blood, take it.”

“I…” He stopped, for once completely wordless. His cock was throbbing now, begging for him to unbutton his pants. He had had a thing for blood ever since becoming ghoul, but he had only ever indulged it when he and the people he was with were high as fuck. And only with people that he figured weren’t going to stick around long, anyway. One night stands. He had never been normal, not really, but even he knew that this kind of thing was a deal breaker for a lot of people. 

And yet here they were, the only two people he’d ever really allowed himself to feel something above the waist for, accepting it. Judging by the look on Lydia’s face, maybe even getting off on it. Slowly he unlaced her other boot and started pulling it down too, inch by inch, trailing his lips over her flesh as he exposed it. She let out a little gasp, and when he looked up he saw that Nick had pulled her skirt up her thighs, was in fact fluttering the fingers of his left hand against her clit as he kissed her throat. The synth was grinding his crotch against her, all shyness momentarily gone. 

_That escalated quickly,_ John thought with a smile. He tried to pull himself away from her. “I really...should...take care of you...first,” he said, gesturing towards the wounded foot. 

“You fellas are taking care of me,” she said. “You know what's a natural pain killer? All those endorphins your body pumps out when you have an orgasm. I meant what I said. Take what you need, John.”

He had never been a paragon of self control to begin with, and now that she had given him permission not once but twice, he found himself lapping at her blood, suckling at the wound. Lydia would have expected it to hurt, but something about what Nick was doing to her with his hands, something about the idea that John was getting off on this, made the subtle throbbing of his tongue against her wound almost a pleasurable ache. She could feel Nick’s erection against her and reached behind herself to unzip his pants. 

“Detective,” she panted, “I’m going to need you to come out from undercover.”

“Far be it from me to deny a beautiful woman,” Nick said, his voice vibrating against the side of her throat. 

Hancock let out a growl that sounded almost feral and unbuttoned his own pants. His dick was as scarred as the rest of him, loops and whorls of flesh tracing its length, and with a flush she thought about how that might feel inside of her. She found herself bucking against Nick’s fingers as she watched Hancock start taking care of himself, the movements of his hand hypnotic. She slid her own hand over Nick's dick, giving him a gentle squeeze between strokes, thumbing at the head of it. 

Nick panted against her ear as he slid a couple of fingers into her, “You find that as pretty a sight as I do, huh?”

She nodded against his chest and let out a soft moan as he slid his fingers in and out of her, bucking against him as he found her G-spot and started rolling his fingertips against it. “Right there,” she muttered at him, “Please,” and Hancock stopped licking at her blood just long enough to smile up at them and enjoy the view. 

In moments she was clenching around Nick’s hand, crying out but not hearing it as she rode his fingers through her climax, burying her face in the side of his neck as she slowed to a shuddering stop. Nick smiled. Some skills that the human Nick had learned apparently stuck around in Nick the synth’s head. 

Hancock couldn’t take it anymore. The pleasure of her blood in his mouth, of his hand on his dick, was sending waves of sensation through his hips all the way into his spine. He gently pulled her legs apart and climbed up to rest between them, waiting for her breathing to slow before he pressed the head of his dick against her clit and started rubbing slow circles over it. 

“I was wondering,” he rasped, “If you might...mind…”

She answered him by tilting her hips up, taking him to the hilt in one swift movement and curling her legs around him, using her heels to press him as deeply into her as she could. Her lips were as sweet as her blood, soft and slick against the rough leather of his. She was tight around him, and so warm, and he was glad she paused for a moment to give him time to catch his breath, to give him time to settle. He wanted the experience to last at least a little longer. 

“Which...one of us,” Hancock asked Nick.

“I...ah...what?”

“He means,” Lydia filled in for him, “Which one of us you’re going to fuck while he’s inside me.”

Nick was quiet for a moment, and Hancock would have sworn he was shy. Embarrassed, even. Lydia must have gotten the same impression.

“None of us are virgins here, Nick,” she said gently. “And I take it from Hancock’s question, we both want you. So you’re the tie breaker.”

“I’ve never...uhm, with a man...I mean, as the, uh, top…”

Hancock laughed, but it was gentle, no scorn. “Well then, you might...as well...try it just once. There’s oil...in my….bag.”

“Because of course there is, you fiend” Nick said affectionately, and Hancock laughed again, this time joined by Lydia. 

Nick eased himself out from under them, and as Hancock laid Lydia down where Nick had been he couldn’t help but to start thrusting into her again, the pleasure already growing. The way Lydia was clenching and unclenching around him, she was close too, already sensitive from her first orgasm. Nick returned, tentative behind Hancock, and the ghoul paused long enough to for him to slide the oiled head of his cock against John’s ass.

“Are you sure about this,” Nick asked. 

“You’ll love it,” the ghoul told him. 

“Not exactly the reason I was asking,” Nick said, but pushed into him, gently at first, with a soft groan. 

Hancock let out a little whimper and went boneless between them, his whole body quivering. Nick made as if to pull out of him, but Hancock called out, “Don’t you even think about stopping, Valentine,” and it occurred to Nick that what was causing the sudden reaction in the ghoul definitely wasn’t pain. Nick gave an experimental thrust, and as he pressed against Hancock’s prostate the ghoul let out a soft little mewl. 

Nick hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect; since going synth, he hadn’t been inside anyone, and despite his companion’s words he certainly felt like a virgin. But somewhere in the back of his mind the memories were there, and he fell into rhythm easily, his sensors screaming at his brain, his skin becoming more sensitive with every thrust. Below them Lydia cried out wordlessly, and not long after Hancock was spilling into her, his forehead pressed against hers, sharing her air. A part of Nick expected Hancock to tell him to pull out, but the ghoul didn’t; instead he kept going too, panting underneath the synth until Nick pulled him tight against his hips, his hands pressing into the smaller man’s hips hard enough that the next day there would be bruises there. Suddenly all vision was gone, sound was gone, and the only thing that existed in the world for Nick was the sweet throbbing that coursed through every sensor in his body.

He came back to himself slowly, his hearing coming back before his sight. 

“Oh shit, I think we broke him,” he heard Lydia say, and weakly he put one hand up.

“Not...broken. Oh man.”

“See,” Hancock said, his smiling face looming over Nick’s as Nick’s vision came back online. “Rebooting.”

He lay between them as they caught their breath, Lydia’s face nuzzled against his collarbone, Hancock’s head on his chest, their hands linked together over his stomach. He had no idea how it had happened, but Nicholas Valentine was pretty sure that if there was a heaven for synths, he had died and gone there.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading music with a southern bluesy flair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHBxJCq99jA

For the first time since he could remember waking up in that trash heap outside the Institute, Nick found himself sliding into a soundless, dreamless rest. His whole body felt like it was made of feathers, limp and light between his companions. He woke at what his chronometer clocked as two hours later, more rested than he had ever been. He could taste Hancock’s sweat lingering on his lips where he had pressed his face against the back of the ghoul’s neck when he had come, and he licked them compulsively, savoring the taste. Hancock’s sweat tasted salty, of course, but it was also surprisingly sweet, almost fruity. Maybe it was the daily consumption of various flavors of Mentats, Nick thought with a smile.

He would have expected, with his luck, with his personality, to feel some embarrassment at them having seen him so raw, so open. But instead he was surprisingly at peace. They knew nearly as much about him as he knew about himself, and by this point he had come to simply accept that they were with him. He still had no idea how they could find him attractive--he certainly thought his gray, torn casing was less than appealing--but he supposed that just meant he understood how Hancock felt. The ghoul talked a big game and played confident, but Nick had seen him studiously avoid mirrors as much as Nick did, had seen him wince when he caught his reflection in passing, and he speculated that the ghoul wasn’t as comfortable in his own skin as he tried to make out.

Nick determined that he and Lydia would have to work on that. If he had his way, that false bravado of John’s would turn into a true confidence before he was through. The ghoul had devoted much of his life to making the world a better place, taking out one petty tyrant at a time and endlessly giving away his own money, food, chems, and ammo. He deserved to feel cherished. 

Nick grinned as John murmured something in his sleep and curled up against him a little tighter. Even unconscious the handsome ghoul was possessive of them, his fingers entwined tightly with Lydia’s, his other hand tangled in Nick’s coat to keep the synth at his side. Lydia was apparently putting her claim in too, one long shapely leg thrown over Nick’s hip, her bare foot hooked around the back of John’s leg. The synth couldn’t have gotten up if he wanted to. 

Good. It gave him an excuse to lie there and daydream about them. After all, they needed their rest, right?

And it was at this point that Nick learned another very distinct advantage of his life as a synth. He knew from the human Nick’s memories that sensation was a phantasm, prone to fading once confined to memory. But as he began to relive the trio’s activities, his sensors picked up the same sensations just as strongly as they had the first time; he could feel their hands and lips on him, could feel himself pushing into John’s tight heat just as strongly as he could at the time, and in moments he was stifling his own cries as he rode the waves of pleasure that crashed through him again. Just as before, when he climaxed his visual and hearing sensors went offline temporarily as his system was flooded with waves of throbbing, sweet, aching sensation. He let out a soft sigh as he rode it out again, letting it fade slowly as his less vital functions started to come back online again. 

Well. _That_ was certainly an exciting discovery.  
*********

Nick fell into another one of those blissful, blank periods of time for an hour or so, and when he woke Lydia had shifted so that her leg was no longer holding him down. As much as he enjoyed lying here between them like the filling of a particularly decadent sandwich cookie, John had developed a wet cough that reminded Nick that the sooner they found a doctor for him, the better. Just before they had left the Commonwealth on this little adventure, Nick had insisted that Hancock have a checkup with Doctor Amari. It was partially payback for Hancock’s insistence that he do the same. Doctor Amari had made it fairly clear that a ghoul’s anatomy might be mutated, but it was mainly all in the same place and worked in many of the same ways. She had even tutored Nick in basic stitching, bandaging, and infection prevention. He imagined any doctor who had opened up a human would be able to get the bullet out of John just as easily; and if the doctor in Baton Rouge or Lafayette couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, well, at least they would be in a place with more access to medical supplies when one of them had to try it. He saw flecks of blood on his ghoul’s lips and had a feeling they’d have to at least make an attempt at it. 

He really, really hoped for a surgeon. Dr Sun couldn’t be the only doctor left in the world who was capable of doing surgery. 

Gently, he disentangled John’s hand from his coat, one rough finger at a time. Even this small action was filled with new wonder for him. He had touched John before they had fucked, of course. But it had always been casual--a pat on the back here, a handshake to seal a deal there, the occasional light smack when the ghoul was being particularly mischievous. Never enough to actually hurt, just enough to let John know that Nick was in on the joke, and that while he was pretending to be the responsible one he was well aware of the ghoul’s innuendos and thought processes. But now, with the implication of permission to run his sensors across John’s skin, every new touch was an exercise in memorizing the man’s flesh. The parts of him that Nick had seen were all exotic, scarred and multihued expanses of texture. It almost reminded him of old documentaries and books he had read before the war about certain tribes from South America, and how they had used bone knives and burning coals to make intricate patterns of scar tissue across each other for beauty’s sake. John’s scarification had been accidental--well, sort of--but it was no less an art for that. His skin was a wonderland of multiple sensations, patches of silky smooth flesh interrupted by tendrils of leather-like scars and intriguing indentations Nick would like, once John was well of course, to dip his tongue into. It took some effort to make himself put the ghoul’s hand back down once he had pulled his coat free.

As he eased out from between them, John and Lydia slept on, but even so they pulled closer to each other. John muttered something under his breath as he pulled Lydia’s head to his chest; she let out a little whimper and buried her face in the crook of his neck. Her hair, glimmering in the firelight, was a thick sheet of wavy silk, sliding over the side of her face, her shoulder and down her back. Nick’s fingers remembered the feel of it, its smoothness rivaled only by the slick bud that brought her undone in his arms. He shook himself and silently started packing provisions for their journey. There would be time to explore every single centimeter of them, once he had gotten John to the surgeon. He hadn’t been kidding when he had reminded John that he wasn’t as immortal as he felt; ghouls were thankfully tough, but it wasn’t impossible for him to get sick enough to actually die. Not to mention the pain and the occasional gasps for air that he was going through. Every wince just made Nick want to do things to Nemo. Things he had no name for, things he had never thought he would have been capable of wanting. It disturbed him to think of what he might be willing and able to do if John died. 

He wanted a cigarette, but with John’s lung problem there was no way in hell he was going to light up inside their makeshift shelter. The low fire he was about to use to cook the pair some breakfast was enough of a worry to him, without adding nicotine and tar and god knew what else to the mix. He stepped out into the moonlight and looked down at Nemo, his lip curling in disgust. 

The ghoul was still alive. Nick honestly couldn’t tell whether he wanted Nemo to go ahead and die, or to stay around so that Nick would have someone to take it out on when John’s attempts to hide his grimaces and soft little whimpers of pain got to be too much for him. Nemo was propped up against the concrete steps, his head hanging down towards his chest. A chest that was still, for the time being, rising and falling steadily. The water he was sitting in--covering the platform he was on by a couple of inches--was keeping the scar tissue where his legs used to be solid, and it was John’s conviction that the longer that scarring had to set, the more permanent the loss of limb was likely to be. Even John had almost felt sorry for Nemo when he had seen the shape Lydia left him in, but all it had taken to bring the steel back to John’s eyes was to have a look at Lydia, at her bullet holes and knife wounds. After that, John had given the other ghoul a swift kick to the crotch and grinned at him as he lay panting. Nick lit his cigarette and he had a flash of a vision, of putting the ember out on Nemo’s eye....

Nick quickly looked away and moved upwind of him. The less of those ideas he had, the better. He had no idea how a person turned into a sadist, but he had no inclination to find out by becoming one himself. Unfortunately, Nemo seemed determined to bring it out in him.

“I heard what you freaks were doing in there,” the ghoul sneered. He looked up at Nick, his white hazed eyes narrowed. 

Nick scoffed at him. “Mind your own business, bucko. We’re all consenting adults.”

“Do you two really think she doesn’t have some motive for being with you? Do you really think she might actually fuck you because she _wants_ to?” He laughed. “She’s a whore, Mr Valentine. She has an endgame in mind. They always do.”

“And what exactly do you think that endgame might be? She can obviously defend herself. Took you out easily enough. She doesn’t exactly strike me as the wilting princess waiting for rescue.”

“That’s not all a woman like that will take from you if you let her. There’s always the drugs.”

Nick scoffed again. “Funny thing about that. Hancock’s been weaning her off of that. She’s down to part of one a day, come to think of it. Guess she’s not after the drugs, huh?”

Nemo was silent for a few moments, the corners of his mouth turned down. Nick finished his cigarette and tossed it out into the water. He was about to go back inside and work on packing again, when Nemo called out behind him.

“Mr Valentine?”

“That’s Detective to you, jackass. What now?”

“Just because you don’t see what she’s after, that doesn’t mean she’s with you just for your dashing good looks. Have a look in the mirror sometime, _Detective_. You’re just a hunk of junk that doesn’t have the sense to lay down and die. And your little boyfriend? He’s just a ghoul like me, and we all saw how fast she threw my ass down.”

Nick stood still in the doorway for a second, his hand shaking, trying to force himself to keep walking into their shelter, to ignore the ghoul. He was obviously just trying to hurt Nick, obviously just pissed off at his own situation. But Nick couldn’t help it. He rounded on the man and took a knee in front of him so they were at eye level. He grabbed the ghoul’s chin in one hand and forced him to look Nick in the eye. He made sure it was his metal hand, the _junk_ hand. 

“Maybe she’s not as shallow as some people, Nemo. You think she dropped you because of your looks? That it’s being a ghoul that made you have to pay for her to so much as let you look at her?” He laughed, his voice cold. “She would never have taken a second glance at you if you hadn’t had the goods to pay her with, that much is true. But it’s because of _who_ you are, not _what_ you are. John told me about the things you were saying to her, about the reason she had all those bruises and cuts on her. You really think you can call a woman ugly, treat her like a punching bag, and she’ll what, fall in love with you? Being with me and Hancock, and not even making us pay for it? That just proves the reasons she didn’t like you had nothing to do with your looks. And that’s what you can’t stand, you sad little bastard. You keep saying ‘poor me’, keep telling yourself it’s because you’re a ghoul if you want to. But she’s hardly the first person that couldn’t keep her hands off Hancock. Nobody wants you because you’re a stupid asshole with nothing to offer.” 

And just because he could, as Nick stood to go back inside, he gave the man a swift, vicious kick to one hip. He immediately felt disgusted with himself...but it also felt kind of good. He wanted to hate himself for what he’d told the man, but a part of him was glad--maybe it would keep the bastard from bothering John and Lydia while they were going toward Baton Rouge.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leadbelly: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6yCEsDsGx4

As Nick puttered around, packing and cooking and in general trying to stay busy while he waited for his companions to get their rest, Nemo’s words kept whirling through his mind. _doesn’t mean she’s with you for your dashing good looks...hunk of junk….Do you really think she’s fucking you because she wants to?_ He knew Nemo had been just trying to get him riled up, that he was angry and hurt and trying everything he could to drive a wedge between them. Probably thinking if he could get them to arguing amongst themselves, it would be easier for him to slip away or finally get the vengeance he’d been obviously craving. Nick knew the head game shouldn’t work on him, that he shouldn’t be _letting_ it affect him. 

But it kept coming back to him, over and over. 

Finally, he couldn’t stand the frustration anymore. He looked over at his...did he dare call them lovers, even to himself? They were still peacefully clinging to one another, their breath in sync. Hancock was wearing a small smile that looked cheeky even now. They would be okay by themselves for a few moments. 

He slid into the back room and up the stairs into the open night air of the ruined attic. They had set up a few buckets, an old metal wash tub and a few semi-clean towels up here last week; Lydia had proclaimed that even though she was living like a savage, she would live like a good-smelling savage. Nick smiled to himself as he sat on a nearby stool and started pouring some water into a small basin. The woman was tough as nails, but she still made time and energy for those little touches that he had never paid much attention to even when he was human. He looked at the rolling cart she had set her cosmetics up on. Three different kinds of scented oils, two kinds of soap, various conditioners and shampoos--all with different scents, of course--deodorants, lotions and powders. He remembered how hot the South used to be before the bombs went off, and he supposed her obsession with hygiene had something to do with that, with how much sweating she had probably done in her prewar life. Made him glad he didn’t have sweat glands; at least he wouldn’t have to worry about that. 

He had managed to scavenge some extra clothes from a defunct men’s shop a few blocks over, so at least he was able to wash those without having to resort to running around naked. They hadn’t had trenchcoats--maybe related to that damned climate difference--but he had quickly lost his unease at running around in just his shirt and trousers. After a couple of Hancock’s off color remarks about Nick’s suspenders, Lydia had proclaimed that she had liked them, and that had been the end of that. As he picked up a mirror for the first time in years and actually forced himself to look into it, he winced. Even his eyes looked like they had a little dust on them. Sighing, he picked up a washcloth and surveyed the soaps. He finally chose one whose label proclaimed it smelled like sandalwood, and while he had no idea what that was or where it grew he did know he loved the way it smelled on Lydia. He had no idea how long this would take--it had been ages since he’d actually had a proper wash up, probably back when Nick had been human. So he started with his privates. It was just respectful, really, if he was going to go around inserting them into other people. The problem was that, as long as he had been starved of affection and as new as it still was to him, that led to him replaying the memories of last night’s tryst over again, which led to more shutting down time. When he came back online, he shook his head at his reflection and gave himself a rueful glare. 

“You’re like a horny teenager again Valentine,” he muttered. “Get your shit together.” 

The rest of it was less amusing, and harder work. The parts of him that were covered in clothing were in fairly good condition dirt wise, but there were a few bullet holes in his casing, where he had dug out the slugs and not cared enough to patch himself up. No one was going to see him anyway, he had reasoned, and taking the time to fill in with a little putty seemed like a waste. He had some putty that almost matched his flesh tone, something that Dr Amari had put together at his first checkup and tried to use to patch him up, but he hadn’t allowed that. He let her touch him only enough to verify that all his basic parts were intact, and anything he judged as frivolous he had promised he would take care of later, by himself.

Of course, he hadn’t. He somewhat regretted that now.

He had brought the substance with him, just in case something blew a hole big enough to cause real problems into him. He was glad of that now as he started smoothing it into various bullet holes, knife scars and even a couple of rips from yao guai claws. His loves hadn’t seen him naked yet, but he wanted to be as presentable as possible when the time came. He patted it down and smoothed it into the rest of his casing as best he could, trying for seamless blending. He felt like it was taking for-freaking-ever, but for those two it was worth it. He even inspected himself, making sure that nothing sharp was poking out of him for them to get cut on. 

Cleaning his face and what was left of his hands and forearms was, of course, a harder matter. Decades of grime had really sunk into his casing, and it was impossible to get some of the stains out. There were still shadows under his cheeks, and all the putty in the world wasn’t going to fix the hole in the side of his neck or the skin that was stripped from his right hand. Besides, he used the thin metal fingers of that hand for delicate work that the hand with all its skin on couldn’t accomplish; he had even gotten to where he could use the metal pinkie finger as a lockpick, when necessary. Neither of them had ever shied away from his bad hand, so he assumed they were used to it. 

After a while, he finally had to concede that this was the best it was going to get. His eyes were brighter now that he had taken the time to wash them--fortunately, the sensors in those were for visual input only, no pain--and the skin that showed was marginally cleaner. At least he wasn’t quite as self conscious as he had been after Nemo’s conversation. He tossed the dirty water out into the street through the shattered window and headed back downstairs, trying to ignore the feeling that maybe there was something to Nemo’s ramblings after all.


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Creedence Clearwater Revival: The Midnight Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T00eJSQimIk

Hancock woke slowly, groggily. The air felt thick as syrup, but he figured it was probably just him--and whatever was currently leaking into his lung. He had a rattly cough and his chest hurt. He hardly ever got sick anymore--even the herpes he’d picked up a couple of months before going ghoul had apparently been cured by the radiation that constantly coursed through his body--and so now that he did feel sick for the first time in a long, long while, he could feel the grumpiness coming on. Usually he was used to sleeping on a few blankets on the floor, but this morning it felt hard and cold and it made him want to try shooting it with his shotgun just to see if by magic that would bring the floor to submission to his will. His boots felt too hot, but the rest of him was cold, even under his own coat and the trenchcoat Nick had spread over them. He could see his hat lying across the room, and it just looked wrong to him. It looked _rebellious_ , like it was going to refuse to sit where he wanted it to today. 

All in all, he just felt bitchy. He wanted to just go back to sleep and let the rest of the world take care of itself for a while.

He pulled the woman in his arms a little closer and pushed his face into her hair, taking a deep breath of some musky, wood-like smell she had been using in her soap lately. At least her skin was warm and smooth against his. Her hands had somehow crept up under his shirt and coat during the night, and her fingers were softly tracing the scars on his chest, the pressure just barely-there enough to tease him. 

Unfortunately, his damn bladder chose this moment to inform him that he would be required to either get up in the next ten minutes or so, or risk embarrassing himself. Letting out a sigh, he pulled away from her reluctantly and went to take care of his business. As he was walking back in, he heard a wolf whistle. Lydia was sitting up now, the bag she’d been rummaging through forgotten in her lap as she looked toward the stairs that Nicholas Valentine was currently coming down. He should have been using them as a catwalk. His shirt was only half buttoned, letting Hancock have just a peek of the smooth, perfectly shaped chest beneath. He had apparently washed some of the dirt off of his face, and while he was still stained it had the overall effect of highlighting those strong cheekbones and that nose that somehow just looked _masculine_. 

Instead, he seemed uncertain, looking down as he made his way to the fire. “Good morning,” he muttered.

“Good morning to you, handsome,” Lydia said, and Hancock saw the way Nick’s posture got a little straighter, the small half smile at the edges of his lips. He had known Nick for a while, had known Nick’s very public “the hell with you if you don’t like me” attitude, but he sensed that underneath that surprisingly fragile dignity, the detective needed the ego boost. 

So, being who he was, Hancock made a point of cupping one hand against the synth’s ass on his way past, leaving a small chaste kiss against the side of his face. “Missed you,” Hancock whispered into his ear.

Nick laughed, and thankfully it sounded genuine. “I’ve been here the whole time, you ass.”

Hancock shrugged at him. “Yeah, but I was asleep through part of it. I’m not taking it back. Missed you.”

Lydia had apparently found what she’d been looking for--a brush and a few hair elastics--and Hancock pulled the brush out of her hand and sat behind her, pulling her hips almost into his lap. Lydia practically purred as he ran his fingers through her hair, over her scalp, letting them stray occasionally to her sharp jawline or her throat. 

Hancock sighed as he started brushing. “I miss having hair,” he said petulantly. Nick glanced back at him, half surprised and half amused, before turning back to his cooking.

“I used to have beautiful hair,” Hancock continued. “Tell her, Nicky. I was a natural blond, and it was thick, and just a little wavy. Women used to love it.”

“It’s true,” Nick said. “Even when he was a little boy, none of the women in town could keep their hands off of him. Wanted to mother him all day long. How many women did you have trying to straighten your shirt and giving you snacks and reminding you to brush your teeth?”

John laughed. “Enough to make Ma crazy. She used to say some of them should have some kids of their own to fawn over.” 

Lydia smiled. “I can see that. As mischievous as you are, I can see a whole horde of mothers chasing after you, shouting ‘John, no!’”

“Yeah,” he said, “There was a lot of that, too.”

“I forgot to ask,” Lydia said. “Nemo. Did he die, or…”

“Nah,” Nick said as he brought them some noodles and fish, “He’s still out there sitting in a puddle. Haven’t quite decided what to do with him yet. Figure we ought to take him back to Belle Chanson and tell them what happened, what he tried to do, but that trip’s going to have to wait until we get back. Which leaves us with the problem of having to put up with his mouthy ass for a while.” 

“What if they’re pissed at us? What if they think we started it,” Lydia worried.

“You remember Abigail’s Book of Talents. She was already suspicious of him when those kids turned up dead. She, for one, would vouch for the possibility of him going psychotic on us. And I sincerely doubt she’s the only one. A man like him, they don’t just snap one day with no warning. I’m willing to bet the rest of the settlers have seen a few worrying signs here and there.” Nick paused and stared into the fire, thinking. “People used to say on tv, oh, he just snapped, he was a great neighbor, no one would ever have thought he was capable. But in reality, when I interviewed neighbors and friends as a cop? A lot more of them than you’d think said they saw little troubling things here and there. Things they tried to explain away in any way they could think of.”

“We ought to just kill him,” Hancock said as he ravaged his breakfast. His appetite was apparently in full force this morning. “I don’t see why we have to tell them anything back at Belle Chanson. Hell, people disappear all the time. Maybe they’ll think he just left.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said uneasily. “Something like that, killing him in cold blood...that kind of thing changes a person. Not sure how I’d feel about being part of something like that.”

“Besides,” Lydia added, “think about how we’d have to spin that when we met up with those settlers again. Think about how hard it is to keep your story straight when you’ve got three people adding to it. Especially,” and here she pointed at Hancock with her fork, “When one of those people is _you_.”

“Hey, I can lie with the best of them Sunshine.”

“I know that. I also know you can come up with some of the most outrageous, ridiculous shit this side of the moon. You can’t help yourself, really. Especially if you’re high.”

“When have I ever been ridiculous? Name one time.”

Nick and Lydia looked at each other, then said in unison, “Jean Luc’s laser pistol.”

*********  
It had started simply enough. It had been during their time at Belle Chanson, of course. John, bored and high, was wandering around the settlement one night, not doing too much of anything. Jean Luc had the misfortune of leaving his laser pistol on the little coffee table outside his house, where he had been doing some maintenance on it when his wife had called him in to read a bedtime story to their kids. John had, of course, “borrowed” it.

It had been okay at first. He was just going to do some target practice, fire a few shots off at the bushes on the shoreline, maybe shoot a few blasts just above Nemo’s head from hiding if he could manage such a thing, just enough to scare the bastard. This had been, of course, before the shit really hit the fan, back when they had only been in the settlement a few days. As he had been aiming at the shore a fish jumped a few feet from him, and he had dropped the pistol into the water. Which he had promptly decided, no way in hell was he going in after it. 

He had feigned total ignorance for three days before Jean Luc finally came to him, saying that one of the settlers had mentioned seeing Hancock walking around that way the night it had disappeared. Jean Luc had just been wanting to ask if he had seen anything, if maybe a kid had taken it as a lark or something, but Hancock naturally took the whole thing as an indication that Jean Luc _knew_. So, once again high on jet, mentats, bourbon and a couple of shots of moonshine, John had begun to concoct his story on the fly.

_Rabid bat, man,_ he had said. _Biggest damn thing I ever seen too. Had to be as big as a Chryslus. Flew over my head, and I was out walking around your house, and I shit you not, I thought I was going to die. So, I saw your laser pistol laying out, and I thought, oh man, God is really on my side this time, or Lady Luck one, because I had left all my weapons in the common house. You know, because I didn’t want to make anybody nervous since I’m new around here, and all. So I picked up your gun, and I was all thinking, if I don’t do something about this big ass bat, it’s going to eat me. And it had these big fangs. And claws. And it glowed in the dark. Yeah. It was a ghoul bat, I think. Had these big hateful red eyes, and it was just glaring at me. So there I was, ducking and dodging and trying not to get killed, and a I took a shot at it, and I swear to you, man, that thing just looked down at the hole in its chest, and laughed at me. No, really, it laughed. Like a human. I couldn’t believe it._

By this time, he’d had quite the audience out on the dock, as it had been lunch time. Half of the settlers sat in front of their untouched lunches, mouths open in awe, but not necessarily at Hancock’s bravery. More likely, in awe of his truly ridiculous storytelling. 

_And so I shot it again, and again, and the damn thing, it used one of its back legs, and it grabbed the gun away from me. And it was flying behind me, and if I’m lying I’m dying, it figured out how to pull the trigger, so now I was dodging the bat, and the pistol. I had to jump off the deck just to escape it, and I hid under there for the rest of the night. And when I came back out from under the deck, the damn thing had stolen your gun. Just flew off into the night with your pistol in its talons, shrieking._ Then the ghoul had tried to mimic the sound he was hearing in his head, a high pitched _eeeeee, eeeee_ sound.

There had been, of course, questions. Why didn’t John ask for help? Because he hadn’t wanted to wake anyone, he said. How had he gotten out of it without a scratch? Because he was just that fast, he said. How come no one else had seen this bat, or anything like it, around these parts before? Because it was obviously drawn to his charisma, he had said.

That had been the breaking point. Nick had groaned and lightly smacked Hancock on the back of the head before making him spill the real story of where the pistol was, then making him swim down there to get it. Jean Luc had, for the most part, been more than gracious and understanding about the whole thing. Lydia had had to get herself into the meeting house and howl her laughter into a pillow, not wanting to hurt Hancock’s feelings but having been trying very hard not to laugh at the image of him trying to outrun a giant ghoulified bat with a functional understanding of how to use a gun. Jean Luc had mentioned that next time he might get Hancock to come tell his kids a bedtime story, which the ghoul had actually been thoroughly enthusiastic about. Later that day Lydia had presented him with a drawing of him running from said ghoulified giant radioactive rabid bat.

Lydia couldn’t help but smile at the memory. 

“All right, all right,” Hancock said, trying to sound aggrieved and not quite managing it, “You wound me. I can see not everyone appreciates my flair for adding a little spice to the truth.”

“Darling,” Nick said, “You add so much spice to the truth, you could give a dragon heartburn with it.” 

Hancock tossed a fish bone at him. “Oi, I think you’re just jealous of my massive literary talent.”

“Yes, yes,” Nick said drily, “That must surely be it. Thank you for your understanding of my inner psyche, John. Now finish your damn breakfast so we can get on the road. Preferably without throwing any more of it at me.”

Hancock stuck his tongue out at the synth, then for once in his life started following instructions.


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jimi Hendrix-- The Wind Cries Mary  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFmlPHHE7Lo

Unfortunately for, well, everyone involved, Nemo was of course planning on being a complete dick the entire time. He bitched and moaned as they loaded the boat, griped at them about how rough they were being when they put him in it when in all actual fact Nick was as gentle with Nemo as he would have been with someone he actually liked, and took every opportunity he could to hurl insults at them. 

It started with Nick. 

“Oh looky here,” Nemo rasped. “The metal man that thinks it has feelings has got all spiffied up for the freaks. Afraid they won’t want to let you fuck ‘em anymore if they get another good look at you in the daylight, tinman?”

That one earned him Lydia’s boot across the side of his head. Hancock had rated the kick a 9 out of 10, proclaiming that she needed to show just a little more leg next time. 

Then it had been a comment about “the whore” and a question along the lines of “So, how many diseases did you give them this go around, do you think?” Another boot up the side of his head, a backhand from Hancock, and at that point Nick, the responsible one as usual, had decided it might be best for all if he gagged the fool. Hancock suggested using the dirtiest pair of used underwear they could find on a nearby skeleton for the job, but Nick had simply shook his head and used his own tie. Nemo had tried to bite at him, but the synth was too fast for him. 

Then there was the sun. John had never been particularly fond of morning sunlight; hell, until very recently he was usually still slightly high and/or drunk by sunrise and the big ball of fire was just too damned _much_. Occasionally he liked to let the late evening sun caress his skin a little, but now that he was both sick and decidedly not high, it was really more of a nuisance than anything. The ghoul was a cantankerous bastard when he was sick, alternating between throwing curses at the sun and throwing his hat melodramatically over his eyes, declaring that he’d been blinded for life. 

Lydia vowed to herself to find him a pair of sunglasses on her very next scavenger hunt. No need for him to be this damned uncomfortable. Or for him to make the rest of them this damned uncomfortable.

Then John was bored and was about to take a chem break with an inhaler of Jet, which Nick promptly plucked from his fingers before going back to manning the motor. Nick had reminded Hancock about his lung, at which point Hancock had put up his middle finger and pulled another inhaler out of his coat pocket.

Which was promptly confiscated by Lydia.

“Okay, that’s it damnit,” John said, wheezing between words. “I’m sick, I’m tired, I’m having to look at his ugly ass-face”--here he pointed at Nemo--”and it’s bright as hell out here. And now you won’t even let a man have his Jet? I’ll take full responsibility for whatever damage it does.”

“No you won’t,” Lydia said, the very picture of calm as she sat in a mound of blankets at the bow of the boat. “You only have one good lung left.”

“Babe, you have to let me try jet on one lung. That might make the hit more powerful!”

“Nah,” she said. “Your windpipe still goes to both lungs, even if one is damaged. Chances are your high will just be half of what it should be, and then there you’ll be, putting your one good lung at risk for nothing.”

Hancock lay back against the side of the boat, staring into the sky like he was, in fact, dying right that instant. “Oh, and here I thought you loved me. Turns out you just want to watch me suffer. How am I supposed to go through this sober?”

“There there,” Nick said, and neither of them could tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “Look on the bright side. Once we get you fixed up you can go back to your quest to destroy every cell in your body with some chem or another.”

Lydia crawled from her nest over to Hancock’s legs, straddling his outstretched shins. “I never said you had to be completely sober,” she said as she put one hand on either side of his thighs. Now she had his full attention. “There are all sorts of ways I can get you high if I try hard enough, I’ll bet.”

“Oh yeah? What did you have in mind?”

“You’ll see,” she whispered against his lips before kissing him. He watched her bend over him, her cleavage on full display from this angle, those shapely hips of hers swaying in time with the boat’s movements. She took one end of his flag belt in her teeth and pulled at it, undoing the slipknot. She unbuttoned his pants slowly and reached in. 

Nemo made some little snorting sound and pointedly looked away from them. This, of course, only made John grin. 

“Whatsamatter, Nemo,” he asked, smirking. “Don’t like to watch?”

“Awww,” Lydia said with mock sympathy, “Don’t tease the animals John. It’s just not nice.” She gave him a little nip at the side of his hip, letting her tongue linger for just a few seconds on his skin. He couldn’t help but to give out a little moan.

“Long as you keep doing that, I’ll do anything you ask,” he said. 

She smiled up at him and watched him intently as she pulled up his shirt and licked her way from one prominent hipbone to the other. He was mesmerized by the feel of her tongue on his skin, the feel of her breath fluttering across him. And damned if he wasn’t starting to feel a little high, too. She was as good as her word it seemed; what she was doing to him was making the sun, the pain in his chest, the rattling of his breath, hell even that asshole Nemo seem very, very far away. She pulled his pants down a little so she could get better access to him and ran her tongue up the crease at the top of his thigh, and his breath almost stopped. He didn’t remember ever being touched there, had never thought of that particular patch of skin as anything special, but damned if she hadn’t found nerve endings there to take advantage of. 

His cock was throbbing now, jealous of the attention she was paying to the rest of his body, but he reigned his impatience in. He had been with a lot of people in his time, and he knew from experience that a little waiting never killed anyone. In fact, it generally made the orgasm better. Besides, ever since he’d gone ghoul, he had never been with someone who was interested enough, and brave enough perhaps, to really take a close look at him like this. She continued to watch him intently, her eyes and ears taking in every gasp, every squirm, and he had the feeling she was filing all the information away for later sessions. He felt the boat slow and looked over for just a moment to see Valentine staring at them, his own erection painfully visible. Lydia glanced over her shoulder to see what Hancock was looking at, then beckoned at Nick with one finger. 

“How about,” she asked, “You distract me, while I’m distracting him?”

The look on Valentine’s face was a sight to behold. “Kid on Christmas morning” fought with “but someone has to be responsible here” and “why do I have to be the one keeping the boat going?!” John let out a ragged cough, and that’s what ultimately ended the synth’s internal battle. Now the new expression was determined regret. 

“Sorry, Doll. Somebody’s got to keep this thing on course.”

“Well, then, Detective, it seems that I’m going to owe you.”

Hancock laughed. “Don’t worry Nicky. I ain’t so far gone yet I can’t pilot a boat. And if I tire her out, hell, I’ll finish you off myself.” 

Nick could feel the heat of John’s gaze all the way from his head to his toes. John’s look spoke of promises. Very, very dirty promises.

Now that she had him in the daylight and they weren’t desperate for each other, Lydia could take the time to properly appreciate John. He was uncircumcised, of course. His dick definitely bore a resemblance to him; long, thin and covered in various veins and textures. She remembered how easily he had been able to brush up against the various sweet spots inside her last night, how it had been almost like he had known exactly where to press and how hard. She licked a trail up his inner thighs, dipping her tongue into the valleys of scars, and she found out what Nick had already discovered: Hancock had a vaguely sweet taste, something that tasted a lot like the simulated fruit flavors of the mentats he chewed constantly. And underneath that, a vaguely chemical undertone.

“You are delicious,” she breathed against him, and was rewarded with a shiver. 

He was almost nervous with the amount of attention she was paying to his skin, with the way she never shied away from a single centimeter of him. He had met a couple of ghoul fetishists in his life, but he had never let them get too close to him. He had seen how they had been with the other ghouls in Goodneighbor; putting them up on a pedestal that they invariably wound up falling from, or asking them for fucked up stuff. Ham had confided to him one day that one girl had even told him to “pretend you’re feral and you’re raping me!” No way he wanted to get into a setup like that. 

“You’re not one of those fetish freaks, are ya Sunshine? Just into me because I'm a ghoul,” he asked suddenly, staring into her face to gauge her reaction.

She climbed up him again and started leaving trails of kisses along his jawline. She pointed at Nemo. “Know what I felt when I was paying him for my chems? Nothing. Every once in a while he’d hit a sweet spot in me, and I’d get a little shiver, but for the most part all I could think about was what I was going to do once I got my fix, and wishing he’d get through. With you though...it's like every touch is wired right into my nervous system.” She pulled back and stared into John’s eyes. “Why? Feeling insecure?”

He shrugged and tried to laugh it off. “Nah, nah, course not. Just, you know.”

She slid one hand down his chest and thumbed at one of his nipples. “It may be true I’m paying extra close attention to all your scars. There’s a very particular reason for it, though. I think you’d approve.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?”

She leaned in and he could feel her answer more than hear it, a soft puff of air against the side of his face. “Because I’m trying to find all the little spots that will make you squirm. All the little spots that will make you lose your mind.”

For the first time since he had been an uncertain teen, he actually stuttered. “Oh, ah, I ah, I ap-approve.” 

She laughed and kissed him. “I figured you might.”

She trailed kisses down his chin, dipping her tongue into the little hollow between his collarbones, before ending up back down on her knees between his spread thighs, looking up at him with what appeared for all the world like adoration. She cupped his balls in one hand and nibbled her way from the base of his cock to its weeping tip, teasing him relentlessly. He wanted to grab her hair, to pull her down onto him, or even to pull her up and bend her over the side of the boat and bury himself in her to the hilt. 

Instead he gripped at his boat seat, his knuckles white, as he determined to let her have her way with him. She lapped at his balls with her tongue, sucked at them, before wrapping one hand around his length and taking just the tip in her mouth. She swirled her tongue around him, and as her tongue dipped at the hole at the head of his dick his hips jerked up off of the seat. He wanted to play it cool, but it had been ages since he’d had a blowjob, ages since he’d had someone lavish so much attention on him. The last time he could remember was when he had still been human, cocky and fair haired and young. Had he really taken this kind of thing for granted back then?

She worked him slowly, pulling back up until he was barely between her lips before going back down on him, taking an inch more each time until he was seated in the back of her throat. She swallowed around him and he could feel the muscles of her throat rippling around him, and the throbbing heat of it spiraled up through his dick, into his hips, he was so close…

She gripped the base of his dick tightly, not enough to hurt, but just enough to keep him from blowing his load. The strange hoarse sound he made was filled with pleasure, longing, and sheer frustration. She rested her chin on his knee and looked up at him with what attempted to be an innocent expression but which was filled instead with mischief. 

“You know,” she said, as if this were the most mundane position in the world in which to have this conversation, “I’ve been thinking. I think I’d like for our room back in New Orleans to be decorated in greens and blues. What do you fellas think?”

Nick let out a little snort as John glowered down at her. “You want to have this discussion now?”

“Why not? It’s not like you were busy, were you?”

He could feel the waves of pleasure ebbing in his flesh now and was about to ask her if she’d lost her mind when, without warning, she plunged her mouth onto him again. Was that _trembling_ in the hands he was still clutching at the boat seat with? 

“You...don’t...fight...ah!...fair,” he panted. She hummed around him and he would have sworn that his vision blacked out at the edges. As she sucked at him she moved her tongue in small wavelike rhythms, her hands roaming over every spare inch of skin she could find. Just as he was getting close again, there came that firm grip, and away went her lips.

He let out a groan. “Aww, come on! What did I ever do to piss you off?”

“Absolutely nothing,” she said brightly. “I just had another thought was all. What do you think about the weather today? Other than the brightness, I mean. That breeze is nice, don’t you think?”

“I think if you don’t let me have some relief I’m going to have a heart attack and die, and it will be your fault,” he groused. He knew exactly what she was trying to do, oh yes, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to gripe about the delaying of the gratification.

“Really? Well, I couldn’t have that. I don’t think Nick will ever forgive me. Might better leave you alone then.”

She made as if to stand up and he growled. “Not that kind of relief!”

She soothed him with a few strokes, a few licks. “Aww, don’t be like that John.” She gave him a few sucks before smiling up at him. “You know I wouldn’t really leave you in the lurch.” 

She went back to her ministrations, and he found himself praying that this time, she’d let him come. The buildup was more intense than it had been last time, that throbbing coiling through his every muscle. He could even feel his toes curling up in his boots, could feel the pressure building even in the back of his head. He threw his head back, panting at the sky as she worked him, and this time she worked him all the way. He let out a strangled little whimper as he came, muscles he didn’t even know he had clenching and unclenching with the force of it. He had a moment’s worry--was it nasty for her, would she maybe even gag? But the sensations that were sweeping through his every cell made even that a small, far away thing at the very back of his mind. He opened his eyes as he felt her readjusting the tricorn hat that had almost fallen off of him. She smiled at him and licked her lips. 

“Did you know,” she said, conversationally, “even your jizz tastes like chems?”

“Huh,” he said, still panting. He pulled her into his lap and kissed her. “What do you know. I guess it does.” 

Nick cleared his throat behind them. “I hate to be selfish over here,” he said, “but I was wondering if a certain mayor was going to abide by his statement that he would pilot the boat for a few minutes.”

With a glint in his eye, Hancock started putting himself back together, rebuttoning his pants slowly. He was still so sensitive that even the weight of the cloth on his dick was a very noticeable pressure. Lydia laid back against the bow of the boat in her little nest, pulling her skirt up around her thighs and moving her legs back and forth to give Nick little peeks at her. She stared at Nick like he was prey. The synth felt a little shudder run through him. Hancock laughed and took over the motor from Nick. 

“I guess it’s only fair. Besides, I could use a show.”

Nick made his way to her almost shyly, as if he were still a little uncertain of her intentions towards him, of her acceptance. But when she reached for him, he came to her eagerly and laid his lips against hers with a fervor. Watching her with Hancock had done something to him, had left him wanting her now more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. She pulled his shirt open and let her hands roam across his chest, his shoulders, his back as he trailed kisses down her throat, stopping to pull her top up and to bring his mouth to her breast. In moments his fingers were inside her, checking to see if she was ready for him. She was dripping and couldn’t help but to wriggle against his hand. 

“There are those magic fingers again,” she whispered to him. “Where the...oh fuck!...did you ever learn to do that?”

He mumbled against the side of her throat. “Detective school. When we say we have ways of making you talk? We aren’t kidding.” 

She laughed and looped her legs around his hips, undoing his zipper. She hadn’t yet had the chance to try him, and she found him to be in this, as in many respects, different from Hancock. He was shorter, smooth and hard as glass, but thick. He moaned against her lips. 

“I don’t know how long I’m going to last, Doll. That little show you put on earlier seems to have gotten me a little bothered.”

She shuddered against him as he found that gorgeous spot inside her again. “You keep that up, you won’t have to last long.”

“Oh really?” He crooked his fingers inside her and pulled them towards himself, sliding them against her G-spot again and again, relentless. “Right there you say?”

She let out a little high pitched sound and bucked against him. He smiled down at her, watching her face as her muscles started to clamp down on his hand. He committed it to memory, the way a flush spread up her chest, throat, and face. The way her eyes slid closed and her lips quivered, the way she kept moving her head and hips and arching her back. He gave her a few moments to relax there before replacing his fingers with his cock, sliding into her slow and steady. She shuddered around him, every touch bringing waves of sensation through her. He was so thick, she was glad he was giving her time to adjust to him before he started to thrust into her, starting slow but steadily gaining pace until he had established a rhythm that had her biting gently at the skin between his neck and shoulder. He groaned but put his hand behind her head, as if to say it was ok, he could take it. She clasped her arms and legs around him tightly, greedily clinging to him, wanting and needing to feel every bit of him she could. In moments she was over the edge again, wailing against his neck, and the motion of her clenching around him brought him over the edge with her.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a cover of skip James's Hard Time Killing Floor Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhRmCMWdRqM

The rest of the trip passed more or less peacefully. When Nick took over the motor again Hancock and Lydia napped for a while. By the time they woke, tangled in each other's limbs and a little too warm, the sun was setting. They were passing under the metal scaffolding remains of an old bridge; someone had covered the old metal with multicolored fairy lights and a wooden sign that read “The BR”. The glow of lights, the smells of cooking meat and fish and the sounds of laughter and talking came from behind a wall of junk to their right. 

It was as if every bit of detritus the war had to offer had been piled up on the banks of the river. Lydia let out a soft whistle. “That’s thinking smarter for you,” she muttered.

“I don’t get it,” Hancock said. “Just what the hell are we looking at? A big landfill?”

“A levee. I guess they figured just in case the old levee weakened, they’d reinforce it with what they had. And what they had, apparently, was junked cars and old refrigerators and tv sets.” 

Perhaps half a mile later they came to a long plywood pier jutting out from the junk wall, and a series of docks with various crafts tied up to it. A few houseboats were anchored just off the shores of the city; Lydia waved at a man beating the dust out of a rug on the railing of his houseboat’s upper deck. The man waved back happily enough, and Lydia smiled.

“Well, that’s a good sign,” Nick said. “Nobody’s tried to shoot at us yet.”

“Yet,” Hancock muttered as he tied their boat off on the dock. “Give us time. I’m sure we’ll convince them to start any minute.”

Behind the men, Nemo started grunting and groaning around his gag. They turned to see Lydia kneeling next to him, one hand sheathed in that peculiar green flame. She grabbed his chin and forced him to look at her. 

“I’m going to take your gag off, and you’re going to be a good little boy, aren’t you? Because you know if you’re not, I might be forced to take another few pieces off of you, right? And we both know I really don’t want to have to do that, because I’d really rather be getting my boyfriend the help he needs. Help he needs because you fucking shot him, so let’s keep _that_ in mind. Are you going to behave yourself?”

Nemo glared at her, but after a moment he nodded. She patted him on the head.

“Good boy. Because if you do anything, anything at all, to slow down Hancock getting treated? I will use your guts for ‘gator bait.” She pulled his gag down. “You ever been here?”

He nodded, and after a moment answered. “Yeah. Caravans come through here too, just like Lafayette. And sometimes we trade here between caravan fairs.”

“You know if they have a surgeon here? A doctor, first aid station, anything?”

He glanced at Hancock, looking for all the world like he might try to hold out on Lydia, but took another glance at the look on her face and decided it would be a very bad idea. “It’s down here by the docks. Soon as you go through the town gate, take a left. Big metal shack. Has a sign out front with some kind of snake on a stick thing, like you used to see on ambulances.”

She smiled as she put his gag back in place. “Now see there? That wasn’t so hard, was it? You keep being a good boy and maybe I won’t have to kill you after all.”

Nemo just kept glaring at her, silently.

Nick helped her onto the dock and they made their way toward the front gate. Lydia and Nick kept Hancock between them, each ready to help him if he got too winded or had any other trouble. They took turns glancing at him, assessing his condition, but tried to keep him from noticing. They knew enough to let him have his pride.

At the gate, a blonde woman in pigtails and a tattered denim dress greeted them with an automatic assault rifle. Her face was covered with a large smile, but Nick couldn’t fail to notice that her finger was firmly wrapped around the trigger.

“Welcome to the BR, y’all,” the woman said. “State your business?”

Nick and Hancock looked to Lydia--probably because she was local, she thought. She wanted to tell them they probably knew more about what was going on at this point than she did, thanks to her long nap, but she knew that the longer it took for them to answer, the more suspicious they might look.

“Got me a couple of tourists here, and one of them got hurt,” Lydia said. “We were hoping you guys might have a surgeon around?”

The woman glanced over the men, her nose wrinkling a little. “Well...we have a surgeon for _humans_. It ain’t the robot is it? They got a mechanic over in Lafayette might be able to do more with him than any doctor.”

“No,” Hancock said evenly, “It’s the ghoul. My doctor back home said we’re not that different to treat than people. Have all the same stuff in the same place, mostly.”

The woman gave him a glance he was more than familiar with, that up and down assessment with her mouth twisted into a little pout of distaste, before waving them in through the gate. 

“Whatever happened to southern hospitality,” Nick muttered after they had passed through the first gate and waited to be let through the second, this one a much more informal mass of chain link.

“Just be glad you’re not black,” Lydia said. “Unless they somehow managed to get over that little bit of stupidity over the last two centuries.”

Hancock looked at her from the corner of his eye. “I had been hoping that was something people made up about the past. Like Moe and his theory about baseball being some gladiatorial combat shit.”

Lydia snorted. “‘Fraid not. What can I say? People were really, _really_ into that whole conformity thing. God alone knows why.”

Hancock let out a little “hmm” and followed her into the city. Moments later he was letting out a wheezy little whistle of appreciation. A few tower skyscrapers still stood, their concrete crackled with age. But facing to the east, several walls had been knocked out and greenery spilled over the sides of the buildings. Multiple colors of fruits and vegetables peered at them between leaves. Tall stalks of corn stood in rows on top of the building, and at its base a few people talked quietly while they loaded melons into a cart. The front part of the city that they found themselves in appeared to be an immense market, the market itself easily the size of the whole of Diamond City. Multiple stalls sold food, both raw and cooked. They passed a stall where a man was cleaning fish, dumping the organs and other offal onto a metal platform. Cats, dogs, and even a few chickens, all of them fat and sleek, crowded around to eat at the scraps the humans didn’t want. Lydia’s mouth watered when she saw a stall selling goat’s milk and cheese, but she put the thought aside for later.

Every settler they saw was unusually healthy by wasteland standards: hair sleek and thick, skin clear over well nourished frames. Children ran between stalls, laughing and playing chase. There was even a stall selling jewelry, bright baubles of glass and metal under a bright bare bulb dangling dangerously low on its cord. The place was filled with smells--spices and boiling seafood, various perfumes from a stall down the way, soap from the stall where several men were busy shaving customers, and below it all the subtle mineral tang of the red clay that peered between cracks in the asphalt under their feet. Music played from somewhere, joyful violin and accordion. From all around them, people called out their wares in accents from everywhere in the wastes. 

The trio was amazed. Hancock and Nick had never seen a post-war city so large, so populated, and with such variety to offer. Lydia because she had been somewhat convinced, in spite of Belle Chanson and stories from Nick and Hancock, that things were well and truly fucked. This city showed her hope. 

“I bet we can find a surgeon here,” she said excitedly to her men. “A place this big? They’d almost have to have one!” 

She sped ahead of them, looking at every sign as she passed until she came to the sign that Nemo had spoken of, and it turned out that there had been a reason he had associated it with ambulances from before the war. Someone had managed to rip the back door of an ambulance off of the vehicle and propped it up next to the shack to serve as their sign. Chipping red paint along the top proclaimed “Healing Here”. 

Hancock hung back suddenly, coming to a dead stop in the middle of the path. He was nibbling at what was left of his lower lip. Nick and Lydia each held a hand out to him, and he took them. His grip was tight, his palms sweaty. 

“Don’t either one of you dare tell anybody that the great Mayor Hancock has a thing about doctors,” he growled.

“Long as you don’t tell anybody that the great Detective Valentine has a thing about mechanics,” Nick said. There was a reason he kept putting off his checkups. 

They entered the clinic.


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cab Calloway's version of St James Infirmary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-XI_1LgEik

The inside of the clinic was as busy as the city itself. A brightly lit room with a cot covered in plastic sat off to the side; a small man in a white coat was busily applying a thick brown paste to a burn on a woman who sat stoically still with tears rolling down her face. He spoke to her in soothing tones, his voice like music as he put the salve down and began rolling bandages around her wrist. The trio watched in silence, not wanting to intrude. The man gave his patient the rest of the salve and some muttered instructions, then caught a glimpse of the trio as he led her to the door. Hancock held his breath, waiting for the inevitable frown, the distaste or the outright rejection.

Instead the man gave him a bright smile and gestured toward the cot. “I’m Dr Matthews. Have a seat and I’ll be right with you.”

“Do you...ah...treat ghouls,” Hancock asked.

“Of course.”

Hancock heaved a sigh of relief. Things had been easy when it had just been the three of them out in New Orleans--well, the three of them and then Nemo, but he hardly counted. Hancock had been relaxed there, with just Nick and Lydia. No worries about having to fight off the nasty comments, having to grin and bear the glares, having to worry about what someone might say to Lydia or Nick to hurt them just because they tolerated him. Now that they were back in a city again, especially one so large, he couldn’t help but to wait for the hate to begin. It was good to see that at least one person in the town thought of him as human. Or human enough to warrant respect, anyway. 

Dr Matthews returned to them and gave them that same sunny smile before having a seat on a small rolling stool in front of the cot. “I’m going to assume you need some specialty services,” he said. “Most ghouls only have to have a hit of radiation to cure what ails them, so this must be something unusual. What’s happened?”

“I got shot in New Orleans. The radiation did heal up the wound, but I think there’s still a bullet lodged in my lung.”

Dr Matthews opened a drawer in the rolling cart next to him and took out what they could only assume was a makeshift stethoscope. Rubber tubing led to the bottom of a small shotglass, the tube glued to a hole that had been melted in the bottom of the glass. The doctor had made ear pieces with small cones of duct tape. He held the shot glass to Hancock’s chest, moving it around several times, then around to his back where he repeated the process.

“Left lung is full of fluid,” Dr Matthews announced. “If I can cut you open and get the bullet out, your body should reabsorb the fluid within a matter of days, maybe even hours with enough radiation.”

“Any way my body might get the bullet out on its own,” Hancock asked.

Dr Matthews raised one eyebrow. “Highly doubtful. Look, I can probably put you far enough under that you won’t feel most of it, with enough med-x and a little anesthetic. I have all the stuff. But there is the little matter of payment.” He caught the look of panic on Lydia’s face and raised his hands. “Don’t worry, I don’t turn anyone down. I was thinking more...of a favor really, than caps. As busy as I am around here, I have plenty of caps.”

“Ok,” Nick said. “We are people with various talents. Why don’t you tell us what you need and we’ll see what we can do?”

“Well, it’s a little, erm, delicate, and the people around town don’t seem to want to do it. I mean, feel free to say no if you want. I can always come up with other ways for you to pay your bill. I just figured I might be able to get an out of towner to do it a little more easily.”

“Spit it out, doc,” Nick said. 

“How do you feel...about super mutants?”

Hancock let out a little groan. 

“I might know how I felt if I knew what the hell they were,” Lydia said. 

“They’re a bunch of over muscled hotheads with a tendency towards violence,” Hancock said. “At least, all the ones I’ve ever met. But then again, there are people who’d say that ghouls are all a bunch of cannibals with a tendency towards forming mindless hordes, so I guess I should try to be optimistic.” He grinned at Dr Matthews.

“We have a group that’s traveled a long way, all the way from the Capital Wasteland. They seem to just be looking for a place to set up a settlement of their own. They can be a little, uhm, temperamental, but they’ve been keeping to themselves so far, and they tend to get all their aggression out in having little competitions with each other. They haven’t bothered us. But try telling some of the people around town that. They’re all convinced it’s only a matter of time.”

“Let me guess,” Lydia said. “You’re asking because you need us to meet with them, right?”

“It’s not really a difficult job. I’d do it myself if I didn’t keep so busy around here. Mrs Forsythe is due to drop her twins any day now, and the guys working on expanding the wall to the west keep getting all kinds of cuts and scrapes, so I really need to stay around here. They have an old mutant woman there who has a lot of experience in using herbs to heal things in their own tribe, and I wanted to try some of their remedies out. They agreed to send over some seeds for me to plant, in exchange for some things from over here; they know better than to try to come into the city to trade. They wouldn’t get two feet in the door before somebody would try to shoot them. I just need somebody to go make the exchange. Everybody around here is too afraid.”

Lydia laughed. “A delivery? That’s it?”

“Well…” Dr Matthew said. “I might have to admit it may be a little harder than that. I mean, you might run into anything out on the road between here and there.”

“I think we can handle it,” Lydia told him. “Besides, if it will help a few supermutants have a place to go so they can live in peace and not _have_ to go raiding just to find the stuff they need, it’ll be worth it.”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell the people around here,” Dr Matthews said. “Desperate times make people--and mutants, and ghouls, and whoever--do desperate things. They say they want to be peaceful, and I believe them. Back in summer I went to their settlement to help them set up their own medical clinic. A lot of them seem a little...uhm, dimwitted. But they were mostly just wanting to mind their own business. But if it comes down between starving and having to kill us to get to resources...well.”

Lydia smiled at him. “So we’ll take the job. I presume that means you will, too.”

“Only one thing. We usually try to focus on keeping radiation _out_ of the city. I’ll need something with some heavy rads in it for after the operation, to help keep blood loss and risk for infection at a minimum. The faster we can heal you up, Mr Hancock, the easier this whole thing will be on you. You’ll still need to stay around town for a few days to let your lungs empty out, but at least if we can get some rads in you, you won’t have to be doing it with a gaping hole in your side.”

Lydia cleared her throat. “Actually, doc, we have that covered. I’m...uhm...pretty much a walking rad source by now.”

Dr Matthews raised one eyebrow at her as she explained part of her history--nothing about the witchery, of course, but just enough about Westek to let him know that her blood was filled to the brim with radiation. He excused himself and went into another room, returning a few moments later with a Geiger counter. After a brief inspection, he shook his head at her. 

“All I’m reading is background radiation.”

“Maybe you used it all on Nemo,” Nick muttered into her ear. 

“Hancock, can I borrow your knife?”

He handed it over to her without a question, and Nick found himself dumbstruck. The way Hancock acted about that knife, kept it always within reach and frequently played with it in his more bored moments, it was like an extension of himself. He really must have it bad for Lydia if he was willing to just hand it over like that. 

Before any of them could react, she held the blade to her inner arm and slashed downward. She barely winced. Her blood welled up immediately, softly glittering in the light of the bare bulb in a way that human blood generally didn’t. It was as if flakes of gold had been sprinkled through her system. Hancock let out a strange little groaning sound and pulled his coat over his crotch. She handed the knife back to him and he couldn’t help but to lick the blade before stowing it in its accustomed spot at the small of his back. 

“Try again,” Lydia told Dr Matthews. 

He ran the Geiger over her wounded arm and let out a low whistle as the device let out a rapid fire series of manic clicks. He pulled away from her quickly and tossed her a roll of duct tape. “No offense, ma’am, but I might need you to tape that up if you don’t want me keeling over of rad poisoning before I can even open him up.” 

They watched Lydia tape the wound back together in silence for a few moments.

“I don’t understand,” Dr Matthews said finally. “If your blood is that radioactive, rads should be pouring off of you like heat. Hell, we should be able to see you glowing. Skin shouldn’t be able to hold it in like that.”

Lydia shrugged. “I don’t understand either. But then, I don’t understand how radiation makes some people ghouls and just kills everybody else. I don’t understand a lot of things about this brave new world of ours.”

Dr Matthews started pulling doses of medX and a few vials of some clear liquid out of his rolling cart. He unrolled an unusually clean piece of leather. Inside, various sharp instruments gleamed under the light. Hancock could feel his balls trying their best to crawl back up into his body. “Well, since we have our, uhm, rad source, I suppose there’s no time like the present to get this done. The sooner we start, the sooner we can get Mr Hancock more comfortable.”

“Quit calling me mister,” Hancock grumbled. 

 

The next hour passed in a blur of shadows for John. Occasionally he would start to feel pain, but as soon as he squirmed or let out the slightest grunt, he would feel the sting of a needle in his arm and in seconds would be under again. 

It wasn’t as easy for Nick and Lydia. Lydia had to stay nearby to help heal John in case Dr Matthews wound up nicking an artery; Nick had to stay nearby because he couldn’t bear to be out of the room with John so vulnerable. Even when the ghoul had been human and young, he had never looked so helpless as he did now, with his torso naked and his breaths uneven. Nick couldn’t look when Dr Matthews opened the ghoul up, his gleaming yellow eyes focusing on the walls, on his shoes, on John’s hand in his--anything except what was happening with that scalpel. Lydia was in much the same shape, keeping her eyes trained steadfastly on Nick. They heard Dr Matthews cursing and muttering under his breath, heard blood dripping to the floor, and finally heard the clink of the metal bullet hitting the top of the rolling cart. 

It was at this point that Dr Matthews directed Lydia to undo the duct tape on her arm. Nick was not a fan of this, wasn’t a fan of any of it, but he knew better than to argue with either of them. He couldn’t help but to glance over as Lydia squeezed her arm over the wound, dribbling her blood into John’s flesh. Dr Matthews kept a thin straw poked through the hole that the bullet had been lodged in. Lydia wondered, but didn’t say anything, assuming the doctor knew what he was doing. John’s flesh soaked her blood up immediately, like a sponge, and she watched the tissues start to flutter and knit together, watched as his wound started to fill in around the blue plastic of the straw. 

“More of that magic,” she whispered. 

As the muscle knit together over the lung, Dr Matthews leaned over the ghoul and blew into the straw, then held his finger over the end of it and yanked it out of the wound and slapped a bit of plastic over it. John made a little coughing sound but was otherwise still and quiet, still under the influence of the chems. Dr Matthews caught Lydia’s questioning glance. 

“Had to reinflate his lung. Restore the pressure.”

They watched together as John’s flesh continued to heal, until what had just happened was just one more scar amongst the many others that had marked him. Dr Matthews directed Lydia to tape her arm back up again. After a few moments, all three of them let out a sigh. Dr Matthews sat back on his stool. Lydia found herself suddenly stumbling on legs that had gone weak with relief, and Nick led her to a nearby chair and sat her down. 

“Where did you learn to do all that, doc,” he asked.

“Books. When they started rebuilding Baton Rouge, they made a real effort to keep some of the more useful books in a safe place. We have whole libraries on medicine, gardening, carpentry. Some of these tools are over a century old, but we keep them in pretty good condition.”

“How long until he wakes up,” Lydia asked. 

“Couple of hours. You can feel free to take one of the extra cots in the back rooms if you want, while you wait.”

She shook her head. “I’m not moving from this spot,” she announced before leaning her head back against the wall. In moments, she was asleep.


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nat King Cole--Baby, Baby All the Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOuBSoCizPA  
> And as a nice flashback to New Vegas, blue moon, this version from Nat King Cole too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21scyhRP_IU

Hancock hated this. He was okay with sitting idly by-- _if_ he was properly entertained. 

But Lydia and Nick still wouldn’t let him have any jet because of his lung, Dr Matthews still wouldn’t clear him to travel, and he still had the habit of getting out of breath when he tried to do anything too fast or to do too much. He was allowed to have mentats and med-x, which was okay as far as it went. But it just wasn’t the same as traveling with his companions and having the chems he wanted, when he wanted them. For some time now he had been used to doing just exactly what the hell he pleased, and this new experience was a bit...frustrating.

Nick and Lydia were as patient with him as he would have ever expected--more so, really. They put up with endless amounts of whining about how he knew his limits better than anyone else and how he had gone through rougher things than this, and neither of them was cruel enough to let “I told you so” pass their lips when he inevitably had to take a seat to catch his breath. He was a little irritated with how much they were having to take care of him, however. Or how much they thought they did; either way amounted to the same. They reminded him to eat, reminded him when his next dose of med-x was due, reminded him to slow down and take it easy and when he wanted to nap he often found that they’d already made a place for him padded with quilts and pillows and whatever else they had found to make it comfortable. It was touching, proof that they cared.

But it also made him nervous. It made him feel like he was the weakest link, like his total-ass uselessness would make them wake up one morning and decide to leave him in the city alone. He knew he was being unreasonable to even think it. Knew that honor alone would ensure that neither so much as thought of such an action. But that part of him that always felt like he was too much of a bother, not good looking enough, not smart enough, not strong enough, was having a field day with this. 

So it was that Hancock and Lydia had their first fight and ended up in the BR city jail.  
*********

Dr Matthews had offered to let them sleep on cots in his clinic, for free, but the weather had been mild with no signs of rain. Lydia had wanted to sleep in her little nest in the boat because, she said, it was just quieter down there, fewer people to bother them. Hancock wanted to sleep down there because a part of him was sure that at least if he was in the boat, they couldn’t slip away and leave him behind without him knowing about it. Not that he’d ever tell them that. Instead he told them, with a lurid wink, that he liked the memories the boat held. And Nick honestly didn’t give a rip where his companions saw fit to sleep, as long as the three were comfortable and they let him cuddle in with them once in a while. 

That first night, once Hancock had awoken from his anesthesia, he had insisted on staggering his way drunkenly back to their boat, and Nick and Lydia had simply gone along for the ride. There was no arguing with him under two conditions: a) when he was way-out-there high (as he was for a few hours after the anesthetic) , or b) when he was miserable (as he was even during said high). Every cell in his body was screaming at him that his body had been ravaged when he woke, and though he kept silently screaming back at them that he knew that thank you very much, that he had in fact signed up for it, his knowledge that this would lead to healing in the future did nothing for his present pain. Though his flesh had healed, it was still tender. The fluid still in his lung was also putting pressure on his chest, it felt like, and that too was hurting. And to top it all off, he wound up popping a fever that had him shivering even under every bit of cover they could find, even between Lydia and Nick’s warm bodies. _That_ had lasted for three fucking hours.

By day two he had insisted that Nick and Lydia go explore the city, saying he could nap on his own without boring them to tears. Reluctantly they had gone, at first insisting on taking shifts to watch over him but finally relenting and allowing him his peace. Lydia had come back with drawings of different parts of the city, of course, and Nick had taken a couple of odd handyman and simple detective jobs that netted him a fair amount of caps. 

On day three, he finally ventured into the city with them. They were sitting at a food stand eating some fish that had been fried in hog fat, Nick making rueful comments about the state their arteries would be in after this trip, when Hancock had first seen it: two men in camouflage tee shirts, looking at Lydia and then laughing between themselves. One of them even pointed at her. He didn’t know what they were talking about, but he had a feeling. At the time she was sitting between him and Nick, close enough to Hancock that she might as well have been in his lap, leaning her head against his shoulder as she laughed at some wiseass remark he had made. 

Hancock had gone uncharacteristically quiet. He assumed that _they_ assumed that he was just tired; he had been cranky lately and they didn’t seem to be surprised by any of his reactions. He was quiet because he was looking around, paying a little extra attention to what was going on. Then something happened that he didn’t have to guess about: a blonde woman walked by and muttered “corpse fucker” under her breath. Lydia turned, her expression questioning. 

“What’d she say,” she asked. 

“No idea,” Hancock said. “Hey, uhm, why don’t you tell me what you’re planning on drawing today.” 

It seemed to work; she really seemed not to have heard what the woman had said and she started rattling off plans about the terraced skyscraper gardens easily enough. But Hancock pulled away from her, just a little, just enough to put some space between them. He’d be damned if something would happen to hurt her or Nick because he happened to be ghoul. He could keep his hands to himself for a few days. They left the food stand, heading for a weapons stall across the path.

Then there was the weapons dealer. The man was tall, at least six feet, and built a lot like that Paladin Danse motherfucker that Hancock had loved to hate back in the Commonwealth. That alone was enough to push Hancock’s buttons a little; it was a knee jerk reaction he couldn’t help any more than he could help breathing. He’d come out of it in a moment, he thought. He always did. But then he noticed the man’s hair, a thick lustrous mane of gold in the sunlight, barely held back by a string of leather. _Then_ he noticed the way the man was looking at Lydia while she made deals, offering artwork and various bits of junk she’d scavenged back in New Orleans for a set of throwing knives with faux pearl handles. Lydia seemed oblivious to the way the man was eyeing her, even going so far as to lick his lips. 

Hancock definitely was not. _What the hell is wrong with me,_ he wondered. He was never the type to be jealous; he had always just felt lucky enough to get what attention he did and felt that it was so plentiful there was no need to try to keep it all to himself. But with Nick and Lydia, somehow it was different. 

As they meandered away, walking slowly, she seemed about to reach for his hand; Hancock pulled himself away again. She didn’t say anything about it. Maybe he had gotten away with it without her noticing, he thought. Maybe because her attempt to take Nick’s hand had been successful, and the synth had pulled her to him, stood up a little straighter. Hancock just couldn’t help himself. 

“You ever think about being with a guy like that?”

The pair looked over at him. Both of them looked confused. 

“Like what,” Lydia asked.

“You know. Smoothskin. Tall. Handsome.”

She laughed. “I’ve been with plenty of smoothskins in my time, John. It’s not like some exotic thing I’ve missed out on. In fact, that was kind of the norm back in my time.”

He chewed on that thought for a minute. Of course it had. He kept forgetting just how old she really was. Back in her day, hell, there had been loads of good looking people.

She let herself bump into him, giving him a little jostle on the shoulder. “Come on, John. Smooth skin’s overrated. Doesn’t tell any stories like scars do.”

He gave her a side-eye glance, but kept looking at the path as they walked. “I mean...maybe you deserve a guy like that though. Somebody good looking. Somebody human.”

Lydia threw both of her hands in the air and sighed to the heavens. “I don’t want to fuck the weapons dealer! I didn’t even flirt with him for heaven’s sake. What’s gotten into you?”

“No, I mean I didn’t mean I thought you did, not that there’d be anything wrong with it if you did, I mean I don’t own you, I mean…”

“Might ought to stop while you’re ahead, pal,” Nick muttered dryly. 

Lydia shook her head at him. “Look. I know things have been weird lately. So, I’m going to assume you’re just...you’re not thinking straight. But get this through your skull, John, and do it quick. If I’m with you, it’s because I _choose_ to be with you. I don’t need you, either of you. I’m pretty sure I’d be just fine out there on my own, eventually. I’m with you because I want you. If I wanted a smoothskin, I’d be with a smoothskin. There were plenty unattached back in Belle Chanson.”

She put her arms around his neck and stepped in close to him. He wanted to pull away from her, for her sake, to keep the locals from bothering her and Nick, but damned if he could. He could smell her again, that woodsy smoky musky smell of her various soaps and oils, that exotic blend that made his pulse speed up. She was staring him down like a woman trying to read something in a foreign language. 

“I’ve had a lot of sex in my life. With a lot of people. Male and female. All different races, all hair colors and eye colors and body types. And I never felt a thing for any of them. It was business, occasionally fun and pleasurable business, but still. I certainly never stuck around them, or let them stick around me, and some of them were pretty hot stuff. What does that tell you?”

He suddenly felt like there was a lump in his throat. He had to clear his throat before he could answer. “That you have really, really weird taste in companions?”

She snorted. “Ok, we’ll go with that I guess. What it should tell you is, it’s not about your body. Which I’ve grown to love, by the way. It’s about that cantankerous smart-assed stubborn adventurous old bastard that happens to live in your body.” 

She leaned in and pressed her lips against his, and he couldn’t help but to kiss her back, to give a little huff of laughter against her lips. 

They were okay for a while after that, walking along taking in the sights as before. Hancock still tried to keep his distance from them, just a bit. His fingers ached to touch them; he held his hands fisted in his pockets. He was relieved to see that a lot of the settlers they passed were minding their own business--some of them didn’t so much as glance at the trio, apparently used to strangers rolling through town. But there were those few that kept giving them dirty glances, whispering behind their hands.

It wasn’t really the comments that bothered him. They certainly never had when it had been just him he had to look out for. He had a sudden image of a ghoul lying broken in an alley, blood curdling around his mangled face as a woman screamed in the background…

He cursed under his breath as he reflexively reached for a cannister of jet but found his pockets empty of all but mentats. Of course. The damned lung. That was taking its sweet time reabsorbing all the blood that had leaked into it when the bullet had been trapped inside him.

Lydia let out a little shriek and fell back against him, pulling Nick away from a stall selling cloth. 

“Get the hell away from there Nick!”

John looked around, trying to see what had gotten her so worked up. Panels of multicolored cloth shimmered across a table, and several jackets and skirts made of the same material lay on a table to the side beside a…

Oh. That’s what had done it. She trembled against him, and he had to stifle a grin. A spider the size of a basketball sat unassumingly next to a stack of soft blankets, using its front two legs to hold a small piece of mutfruit. The thing was as shimmering as the cloth it sat near, its rounded back a rich sapphire blue that seemed impossibly rich and glossy. Its eyes--nine of them--blinked in unison at them, as if it was wondering what the hell was wrong with them. It nibbled at its mutfruit and watched them calmly.

“Don’t worry,” a soft woman’s voice said in thick Cajun accents. “That’s just Marty. He won’t hurt you. He’s a vegetarian.”

Slowly, Lydia relaxed a little, and Hancock couldn’t help but to feel a pang as she slid out of his arms and a little closer to the stall.

“Well,” she said slowly, “Don’t I feel stupid. Of course you wouldn’t have him just sitting there like a pet if he was dangerous. He doesn’t bite, does he? Because he has awfully big, uhm, biteys.” 

Nick raised one eyebrow at her. _Biteys?_ She seemed to momentarily be having language difficulties.

The woman, a plump redhead with as many freckles on her face as there were stars in the sky, laughed gently. “Nah. He doesn’t bite, unless somebody attacks him or me or his friends.” She pulled back a curtain of the shimmering cloth in the doorway of the wooden shack behind her stall and pointed inside, where a few more of the creatures were busily spinning thick webs. Apparently they came in every color--glittering red, orange, green, and even purple bodies hovered over their work. “That’s Ruby, Tiger, Lilypad, and Blossom. They make all this cloth.” 

The woman then went into a spiel about how it was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight, yadda yadda. John was still too preoccupied with his humor to listen. Who’d have thought that Lydia, a woman who had barely blinked at her first sight of a ghoul and a synth, a woman who regularly played with fire and who he had witnessed jump from the third story of a balcony back in New Orleans like she thought she was made out of rubber because “it was quicker than the stairs,” would turn out to be scared of spiders, of all things? He understood of course that these were probably bigger than the ones from her time period. As far as he was concerned, that was actually kind of a good thing--they were easier to spot and shoot at. He waited patiently while Nick insisted on spending some of his caps on a few blankets, skirts, and a shawl for Lydia.

But then his humor soured again as he caught sight of the same two men from the food stall, camouflage shirts and all, looking over at Lydia and pointing again. The blonde that had muttered about her being a corpse fucker was talking to them, too. Shit. He was having flashbacks to Vic and his closest goons--all human--all over again. 

Lydia wrapped an arm around him, but he pulled away from her quick. “Cool it with that for a minute, would you?” He barely thought about it, focused so intensely on watching the guys in camo. 

She pulled away as quick as if she’d been burned. Nick simulated clearing his throat, and Hancock turned his attention back to them to see Lydia stalking off through the market.

He realized what had just happened and started after her, grabbed her arm so he could try to explain, but this time it was Lydia who pulled away from him. 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she growled. 

Shocked, he let her go and watched as she disappeared down a side street. 

Nick was giving him The Look, the one that only meant two things: either he was deep on a case or John was in trouble. This time, Hancock had a feeling it was a bit of both. 

“You wanna explain what just went down here to me? If you can?”

Hancock sighed. “You know that drifter I watched Vic’s goons beat to death?”

Nick nodded. “Yeah. That was years ago, though. I thought you had gotten all Vic’s goons. Those guys remind you of them or something?”

“Sort of. There’s a little more to that story…”


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam Cooke: A Change Is Gonna Come https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMIDO1j1Ovc

_He had been 16 or 17 at the time, young Johnny McDonough on the streets of Goodneighbor, looking for a good time and trying to forget about some of the shit the Commonwealth tried to throw at him day after day. Trying to forget about how every time he made his way back to Diamond City, his mother begged him to just stay home with her while his father lectured him about how he was a waste of air. By now his drug habits had gotten pretty bad, to the point that getting high was the first thing he did when he got up and the last thing he did at night. When caps were short--and they generally were--and he had to choose between chems and food, chems won hands down, every time. Food would keep his body alive, but with chems he could not only ignore the hunger gnawing at his belly, but also ignore everything else. He was as good at sucking dick as he was at fucking women, and he never had to want for a companion--or, consequently, a high--for too long. It was why later, when he was John Hancock Mayor of Goodneighbor, he never really held it against people when they offered him sex solely to use his chems. He had lived that life, and he understood it. Better than he wanted to._

_A lot of his one-nighters let him sleep in their beds overnight, but a lot of them didn’t. He didn’t know if they thought he’d rob them blind when they weren’t looking, or if they just didn’t really want to be bothered with him after they got their rocks off. That he understood, too. When he wasn’t spending the night with one of his fly-by-night companions, and when the weather permitted, he generally slept propped up against a wall outside what would later become Bobbi No-Nose’s dig site. At first it had just been because it was quiet and there was a streetlight there, but it quickly became something more._

_He liked his neighbors._

_On the other side of the alley, beside the dumpster, a smoothskin brunette with big brown doe eyes kept her and her man’s little corner swept clean. She had the prettiest dark brown skin he'd ever seen. Her man, a ghoul, looked for odd jobs during the day, but in Vic’s day Goodneighbor had been somewhat ghoul-phobic and if there were human drifters around the jobs generally went to them first. The woman spent a lot of her time foraging; she shared the fruits of her labor with Hancock a few times. She generally kept her and her man fed, and the ghoul sometimes got enough caps together to get them a room at Hotel Rexford for a few days before they had to go back to their little place by the dumpster again._

_They were beautiful to John. He tried not to let them know just how much he watched them, but he was pretty sure they knew anyway. The way they could always manage to make each other laugh, even when they were stuck under a holey tarp in the pouring rain. The way the ghoul would make his woman put her feet in his lap so he could massage them after she had been out foraging for a while, and the way the woman would smooth her hands over her ghoul’s face as they lay curled up together at night before sleep overtook them. How the ghoul always insisted that his woman take his coat if it was cold, claiming rads kept him warmer than her anyway. But John had seen the way the man had shivered when he thought the woman wasn’t looking, and had known the truth; he simply cared more about her than he cared about himself. They talked sometimes under the stars, small talk about nothing that important. He learned that their names were Sam and Sally, and they had been together since they were children. They had lived next door to each other in a little settlement to the north, until raiders took the place over when they were twelve or thirteen. No matter where they went, they stayed together. They never discussed how Sam had gone ghoul, but it was obvious in the way Sally looked at him that it hadn’t affected her love for the man._

_But it did affect the way they were treated. Sam was mild mannered enough, or maybe just smart enough, to simply take it all in stride, ignoring the comments and the glares and the occasional kick as best he could and encouraging Sally to do so as well. Day after day Vic goons tormented them, always of course sticking together in a big pack to ensure that if Sam ever did try to comment back, he would wind up with a few broken bones for his trouble._

_What tested him the most, John had realized, was how they treated Sally. He had heard it all. “What are you doing fucking a zombie, sugar? You ought to let a real man show you how it’s done a time or two.” “How much you wanna bet she has maggots in her cunt?” “Does he even have a dick left, or did that rot off too?” He had seen Sam grinding his teeth, had seen him fisting his hands up so tight that he was surprised blood didn’t drip down to the pavement._

_Some bullies would have gotten bored eventually, but not Vic’s goons. They saw the man as a challenge, one they were determined to break. The night Sam died, it was because they had finally made it._

_It started out with the same shit: the goons wandering down their alleyway drunk, laughing and running their mouths. John had been leaned up against his wall, drunk enough that the world spun and high enough on calmex that he almost didn’t care about the nausea currently rocketing through him. Back then, he had done a lot of “downers” like calmex, but after that night he hadn’t touched one for several years. Hadn’t even considered it._

_Vic had a new goon, some guy with a blond crewcut and a broad, acne-pocked nose. This one started up with the usual comments about how Sally should let a real man show her a good time and blah blah blah, but the couple had been doing well at keeping their heads down and being as unoffensive as possible until the man had actually touched Sally. He had put his hand on her ass, just as bold as you please--something none of the others had done yet._

_Something came over Sam then. His voice had sounded like it didn’t even come from him, a low growl that John had never heard him make. “Don’t touch her.”_

_That, of course, had only encouraged them. The man had let go of Sally’s ass, only to grab her and pull her into his arms, putting one hand over her breast and squeezing hard enough to make her cry out in pain. “Don’t what, zombie? You giving me orders? Maybe I should show you what to do with a woman like this,” the man had said, pulling her shirt up now. “Maybe I should make you watch me ruin this bitch. Show her what happens to women who put out for dead men.”_

_There hadn’t been any good options. Not really. If Sam did nothing, they would keep hurting his woman. If he said or did something, they’d hurt him. But he had always cared more for her than he did for himself, and he had launched himself at Crewcut, sinking his teeth into the man’s arm hard._

_Things had moved very fast after that. Crewcut had shoved the woman to her knees in the alley so he could free his hands up for Sam. They had formed a circle around them then, two of them holding Sam up by his arms so that Crewcut could have easy access. Between blows to his abdomen, chest, and face, Sam had tried to call out to Sally, to tell her to run. But she was just as lost as he had been, screaming and crying as she tried desperately to pull the men off of him. All she had received for her troubles was a punch hard enough to shatter her nose against her face; blood spattered the pavement._

_John, still in his haze of liquor and calmex, had been trying to get up, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He tried crawling, but every jerky motion made the nausea worse and he ended up hovering over a pile of his own sick, his stomach clenching and unclenching in waves, Sally’s shrieks tearing through his head, the sounds of Sam’s gasps for air between blows scraping against his conscience._

_The goons had beaten Sam to death. To John, it had seemed to take hours. He was sure it hadn’t in reality, but he would never be sure--ghouls were tougher to kill than humans, and could take more damage before dying. By the time they were through with Sam, his brains were steaming on the pavement. John had shut his eyes at some point, but he could still hear it all, still smell the blood. He heard them laughing as they left the couple there. Heard Sally’s sobs, heard her begging Sam not to leave her. He had passed out then._

_By the time he came to, Sally was dead, too. He had heard about it later, how she had walked right up to Vic’s goons, how she had tried to grab for one of their guns. He would never know if it had been an ill advised attempt at vengeance or a successful suicide._

“When I took that chem with all the rads,” he said, “I knew what it would do. And I felt like, I would be okay either way. If it killed me, I didn’t have to live with the guilt anymore. And if it turned me ghoul? Every insult, every look in the mirror, would be my way of trying to atone for it. Trying to make up just a little for what I did to Sam and Sally.”

Nick pulled John to him. The smaller man trembled in his grip. “You were a kid, John. A drunk, high, sick kid that was outnumbered and outgunned. Even if you could have tried to help them? All you would have done is gotten yourself killed.”

“Seemed preferable at the time,” John muttered against Nick’s chest.

“But if you had got yourself killed, think of all the things that never would have been. Vic, or somebody like him, would still be in charge of Goodneighbor, and all those ghouls and drifters would have one less safe place to go. Aren’t enough of those as it is. All the people you’ve fed, and found housing for, and tried to heal? All the people you’ve helped since then? Some of them would have died.”

John sniffed, and Nick had a feeling that the ghoul was in tears, but he wasn’t about to mention that. 

“I just...I can’t forget that night, Nick. I’ve tried. I’ve forgotten a lot of other things in my life, thanks to jet and all my other old favorites. But that one stays with me. And I don’t want it to be you and Lydia. I don’t want to have to watch someone trying to hurt you, or for you to have to watch them kill me.”

Nick tightened his hold. He felt the look the men in camo were giving him, but he glared back at them pretty brazenly and they suddenly decided they had other places to be. “I think we’ve already established that Lydia is pretty much a force of nature. And we’re not exactly helpless here. It sounds like Sam and Sally weren’t armed. We are. To the teeth.”

“True,” Hancock muttered. “I just...I can’t help but feel like that’s what’s coming to me though. Like the universe is just waiting for me to be happy so it can make me pay for it by taking you away from me.”

“Bullshit,” Nick said with a sudden violence. “Tell that part of your brain I said so. You couldn’t help what happened that night, and you don’t deserve that to happen to you any more than they deserved it when it happened to them. I’ve got your back, and Lydia’s. And she’s got ours. The only way you’re going to lose that woman is if you push her away.”

John pulled back and looked up at him. Nick had been right; his eyes were wet. “I guess she’s probably pretty pissed right now, huh?”

“Seems like.” Nick kissed him, slowly, deeply, letting his good hand caress the ghoul’s jawline. “But I have a feeling you can figure out how to make it up to her. Might want to start by explaining to her what you just told me.”

Hancock sighed and went off to look for his very angry woman.


	35. Chapter 35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The infamous Wynonie Harris of "Grandma Plays the Numbers" and "Don't Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me" fame, with "Good Morning Judge": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBeASSgWJsY&list=RDvBeASSgWJsY

Lydia considered it. She really did. It would serve Hancock’s crazy ass right if she _did_ go back and fuck the weapons dealer, just for spite. She wasn’t really turned on by him, but there had been a sword there she had her eye on, and she was pretty sure with the right combination of words and talent she could get him to part with it. 

But she wouldn’t. For the first time in a long, long time, the idea of having a stranger’s hands on her kind of pissed her off. She had gotten so used to it for so long that she had barely noticed for a while there, but after seeing that heat in John’s face, that uncertainty and pure adoration in Nick’s eyes as he slid into her, she just...didn’t want anyone else to touch her. She wandered the city, peering up at the terraced skyscraper gardens, watching a handyman maintain an immense water purifier, spent a few minutes listening to a woman tell a joke involving a raider, a super mutant, and a child of atom going into a bar. 

But in spite of her attempts to keep herself distracted, she couldn’t help but to sigh. He had been staring at other people when he had rebuffed her, had been watching those people watching him, and he hadn’t wanted her to touch him. He had been embarrassed of her, probably. Probably thought they could tell she was a whore just looking at her, and why not? Nemo had been able to tell. Maybe she just carried it with her, something in her expression or body language. And while it hadn’t seemed to bother him while they were in New Orleans, well, they had been alone then, hadn’t they? No one else to impress. No one to judge them.

Part of her anger was at herself. She had let herself be taken in by his charm, his wit, the way his eyes would crinkle up when he was about to make another one of his godawful puns. Had let herself believe that the way he touched her, the way he watched her, really meant something. The stupid little whore who fell in love with a client, she thought, and not even a paying one at that. Oldest story in the book. How many of the working girls she had known had been taken in by pimps that way? The men would sweet talk them, buy them nice things, take them out and show them a good time...all to get them hooked. Once the men knew they had fallen for them, out came the real motives. 

She sighed and sat on a bench near a guy selling chems. Just what she needed, another reminder of John. She wondered about Nick, now. Was he just enjoying her as a good time girl, too? He hadn’t seemed to have any hangups about her touching him in public, but that didn’t mean he was exactly invested in her. Maybe it was just about sex for them. Maybe they were settling for her because of their damned low self esteem, thinking they couldn’t get an honorable woman to fall for them. 

She had crossed her arms and was glaring at the pavement in front of her hard enough that it ought to have been melting when who should come diddy-bopping up the road but John Hancock himself. He at least had the sense to look abashed, but she quickly turned her head to face away from him and stared at the pavement on that side of her bench.

He stood in front of her, fiddling with that damned knife of his, almost dropping it twice. “So, ah, you seem, I don’t know, a little mad.”

She huffed at him, raised one eyebrow, then turned back to the oh-so-fascinating asphalt wordlessly. 

“I ought to explain I guess. See, it’s like this…”

“Don’t bother, Mayor Hancock,” she said, her voice cold. “I get it. You’re embarrassed to have our relationship be seen in public. It’s all fine and well getting your dick sucked when it’s just us, but in the presence of others you want me to, how did you put it? Cool it with that for a minute? Consider it cooled, salope. In fact, consider it _iced_.”

He winced. If it was anyone else in the world, he would have just saluted her and walked off, chalked it up to his own stupidity and let her be. But even the thought scared him. For the first time in his life, his need to run was outpaced by his need to fight for her. “Look, I can explain. It’s not what you think…”

She scoffed. “It never is, Mayor Hancock. That’s what they always say.”

And now, he was starting to get pissed. He wasn’t “they”. Didn’t she know him well enough by now to know that much, at least? That he was honest about the important stuff, even when it hurt? “Look, if you’ll just let me explain…”

She let out an overly dramatic yawn. “No need. Really.”

“Okay, that’s it!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her up from her bench. He took her chin in his hand and made her look at his face. That was a mistake in a way; her eyes were brighter than ever, hypnotic, and he was almost lost for words. But his anger was serving to keep him at least somewhat grounded. “You can kick my scrawny ass to the curb if you want to, Lydia Belmont, but you’re at least going to let me explain things to you so you’ll know _why_ you’re kicking me when you do! And it’s not that I’m embarrassed to have people see me with you! If anybody here should be worried about how other people see our..whatever the fuck this is, if should be you. I bet half the people in this city would want you, but you’ve been fucking a _ghoul_.”

Her nostrils were flaring by now, her face flushed, and he had a moment to think _oh shit, I think I just pissed her off more_. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet.

“And what the hell difference is that supposed to make? I’m not asking them to fuck you. It’s none of their business if I want you.”

“You don’t have any idea what people can be like out here,” he said. “It’s brutal, and it’s not fair, and some people kill people for fucking ghouls.”

"Oh and I have no idea about hard lives, right?" She narrowed her eyes at him.

"I never said that. See that there? That is you putting words in my mouth."

She tried not to think about what else she might like to put in his mouth. She sighed. "So you're not embarrassed of me? You're trying in your own fucked up way to protect me from risk of imminent death? Do you realize how crazy that sounds?"

"Hey babe, I'm the king of crazy. You kind of knew that part already, didn't ya?"

“I have always had a thing for total nutters,” she smirked, and damnit, just like that he realized he was hard. Again. He wasn’t sure if it was a buildup of all the time he’d spent trying not to touch her, or if it was the anger getting his blood pumping, or if it was that mischievous look on her face, or the way she said it, but…

He couldn’t help himself. He leaned in and kissed her, half afraid she’d shove him away. Instead she pulled him in closer, sliding her hand under his belt and letting her fingertips barely brush against him. He let out an obscene little groan against her lips.

She nipped his lower lip and grinned at him. “Careful, John. Someone might notice I’m a ghoul fucker.”

“Back to John now, huh? Is that a good sign?”

She wrapped her hand around his dick and gave him a little tug that had him up on his toes. “What do you think, John?”

He was breathless against her lips. "I think you're trying to kill me. But then again, what a way to go..."

Behind them, the chem salesman cleared his throat. “I ain’t against a little lovin’ and all, but y’all might want to chill out over there. Guard’s coming and we got a rule about public sex here.”

Neither of them paid a bit of attention. Might not have even heard him, actually. John was backing Lydia up to the bench she had been sitting on, sliding his hand up the side of her thigh, pulling her skirt up with it. 

“Seriously y’all, here comes the guard man, I’m telling you…”

Across the street somebody let out a wolf whistle. It was about that time that a pair of handcuffs snapped shut on Hancock’s right wrist. 

_Well, shit._


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TLLcvWeiKw--Runaway--Del shannon

Nick had known it would happen eventually. Wandering around with both Lydia and Hancock, it was practically inevitable that one or the other of them would wind up in a jail somewhere along the way. He didn't quite expect it to be both of them at once, though.

He had gone back to the cloth saleswoman to ask about those spiders--he couldn't help but be as fascinated as he was creeped out--when a security guard had told him that his companions had been arrested and had named him as their emergency contact. He had sighed dramatically, pulling his hat down low as he pondered just how long to make them wait. 

"What did they do?"

The guard, a young pudgy man who was balding prematurely, blushed from collar line to the top of his head. "They were, uhm, in public, getting...frisky."

Nick couldn't help but to laugh. "You don't say. I guess that means they've made up again."

"We were originally going to keep them for a couple of hours, first offense we just keep them long enough to cool off a little before we ask 'em to just find a private place next time, but, ah, they're a little...noisy."

"Huh," Nick said, feigning shock. "Surely not John and Lydia. Well, lead the way then. I'll take responsibility for them."

As soon as he entered the jail--an old dry cleaner's that had chain link cages lined along the back wall--he could tell exactly why they had called him to come pick his companions up. He could hear them arguing before he even opened the door.

First it was John, sounding really heated. "I'm telling you, Titus Andronicus is all about the human condition. It's better than Hamlet hands down, any day."

"You might think that because you can identify with it more, but neither one is better than the other. They're just different, that's all."

"No, Titus is definitely better. There's more action, more sex, and a bigger setting."

"It's not always just about the action. And the sex in Titus is hardly titillating, if I remember correctly."

Nick stood in the doorway of the jail, looking at the scene before him. They had locked John in a cage at one end of the room and Lydia at the other, probably to keep them from being able to get their hands on each other. They stood facing each other at their chain links, their fingers pushed through the open spaces between wires, breathing hard. John would occasionally let go long enough to pace like a tiger, that ridiculous yet perfect coat of his flaring behind him, and Nick honestly couldn't tell if the ghoul was just working off nervous energy or trying to show himself off to Lydia. Maybe a little bit of both. A beleaguered looking guard leaned against the wall across from them, slowly beating his head against the wall behind him. Nick simulated clearing his throat. 

"Well well well. When I told you to make up with her, John, I didn't mean have makeup sex in front of the whole city."

They turned to look at him and he was struck by two things. The first was that neither of them looked like they were _actually_ mad. The second was that they were arguing merely to let off steam as a substitute for what they'd _really_ rather be doing.

Lydia gave Nick a huge smile. "Nicky! The one I'm not mad at!"

John turned to her and gave a little huff. "I thought we had worked that out."

She rolled her eyes. "No, we didn't really work anything out. You just tried to win an argument with sex."

"I would have, too, if the guards hadn't caught on."

"We still have some talking to do, Mister."

Hancock smirked at her and gave her a little wink. "You sure talking's what you really want me to do with this silver tongue of mine?"

She let out a little chuff of laughter before putting on her mad face again. Even Nick could tell it was hard to keep it, though. "See? There he goes again. He always try sex to win arguments?"

"That or chems," Nick said, "and it usually works. I take it he didn't get around to telling you what he told me."

"Oh, he did. Before we started arguing about Shakespeare, of all things. But I've decided I'm going to still be mad at him for a little while anyway." 

"Aww come on Sunshine, I already promised you that next time I'll just talk to you about it."

She grabbed at her chain link and gave him a goofy, lovestruck grin. "I know. And I'm not really angry at you. But it's amusing to watch you try wriggling your way out of trouble."

John laughed. "You see what we have to put up with, guards? Come on, man, how can you blame us?"

The balding one started unlocking their cages. "Look, I don't care about blame. I care about keeping my job and keeping the peace. Next time you feel like, uhm, settling your arguments, don't do it in the public square, allright? We have children running around here, y'all, and I don't want to have to be the one to start giving explanations to their parents."

Nick grabbed John's collar in his left hand and Lydia's in his right, like they were misbehaving puppies. "I'll try to keep them in my sight from now on, officer."

Hancock, predictably for him, leered at Nick. "That a promise, Nick?"

Nick shook his head and led them toward the door. "Only you could find going to jail amusing."

"Aww come on," Lydia said, sidling up to Nick. She shrugged her collar out of his grasp, then grabbed his arm and put it around her shoulder. "Haven't you ever wondered what it's like to be on the other side, just once? Maybe see what handcuffs actually felt like?"

He was glad he couldn't blush. He had thought about it. Specifically, with them. As soon as he heard that they were in the clink. "Long as we're not in the public square when we do it," he growled into her ear, "I might just be open to all kinds of things."

Lydia, not as lucky as her men, did show up a blush, from the roots of her hair down into her cleavage. Nick just grinned at her. 

They were hardly a few steps out of the jail when Lydia was grabbing John's hand and pulling him into an alley, ducking behind an old dumpster. "Nick, you mind keeping watch for a minute? Or do you want to go first?"

He felt his processor stutter, yet again. It did that a lot around these two. "Go first? Doll, I just bailed you out!"

"That's why you're taking turns and keeping watch, silly. We could have a code, like, 'My officer, what big cuffs you have." 

He let out a little groan at that. John's sense of humor was rubbing off on her. And that wasn't all the ghoul wanted rubbing against her; John was already pressed up against her, his hands manic. Lydia, for her part, was trembling. He supposed the boat wasn't any less public than the alley; hell, they'd probably have more cover here in the daylight. As worked up as they were, he doubted he could even get them back to the boat before one of them just imploded from the tension. And he had to admit, seeing them like this was starting to have its effects on him... "Just be as quiet as you can, would you?"

"Thank god," John muttered, and pulled Lydia further into the alley. Nick turned to face the streets, keeping watch as he'd said he would, but he could still _hear_ it all. Could Lydia telling John not to bother with foreplay, that "I want it hard and dangerous." Heard John let out a soft chuckle; he couldn't help but sneak a peek and saw John had grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, tracing one hand along her throat and kissing at the juncture of shoulder and neck. She pressed her hands against the wall to steady herself and Nick forced himself to look out at the road again. 

Nick had never been one for exhibitionism, but by the time he had had to listen to them going at it, he was too hard to care where they were anymore. He guessed they were rubbing off on him, too.


End file.
